Parking policy and its mechanism toward a sustainable city in china : a contextualized analysis approach

Abstract

Parking, as one of the components of an urban transport system, may have strong influences on the sustainability of cities. In consideration of Shenzhen, China, as a case study, the main research question of this thesis is “how and in what way can parking play a role in the promotion of sustainable transport in the context of Chinese cities?” To address this question, several relationships are hypothesized: (1) parking availability is strongly influenced by both parking regulation and parking market, (2) parking availability and built environment always interact with each other, (3) parking availability and built environment play a collective influence on car use.

To verify these hypotheses, diverse methods are used, including (1) a longitudinal comparison in Chapter Six to analyze the spatio-temporal dynamics of parking supply and demand, (2) ordinary least square (OLS) model and geographically weighted regression (GWR) in Chapters Seven and Eight to explore the spatial relationship between parking supply and built environment, and (3) structural equation model (SEM) in Chapter Nine to dissect the interrelationship among parking, built environment, and car travel behavior.

The major findings of this thesis are as follows. First, an obvious spatio-temporal mismatch between parking supply and demand exists in Shenzhen. Second, parking market plays the role of shaping the actual parking distribution despite the strict parking regulation in China. Third, parking spatial distribution in Shenzhen is antithetical to the goals of sustainable transport in many ways because 1) areas with better transit accessibility are simultaneously provided with more parking spaces and 2) a large number of parking spaces are concentrated in the central city where traffic is already clogged. Fourth, a fine-grained street network can naturally reduce parking supply in the market environment. Fifth, parking quantity is found to be statistically correlated with car use. Travelers to and from the areas with more parking spaces tend to drive more frequently. Sixth, the role of compact land use in reducing car use is reinforced in some cases but compromised in others. Specifically, high density only plays a limited role in reducing car use in Shenzhen because sufficient parking spaces are provided simultaneously in those dense areas. By contrast, a small neighborhood scale (or a finer-grained street network) is more useful in terms of leading a sustainable travel behavior because areas with finer lot subdivisions always possess better transit accessibility and less parking provision.

This thesis has several academic significances. Theoretically, it provides novel evidence for a better understanding of the complex interrelationship among parking, built environment, and car travel behavior. Methodologically, this thesis shows the superiority of the two modeling approaches of GWR and SEM, which have been under-utilized in parking-related studies. In addition, this thesis provides some policy implications for a sustainably oriented parking reform in China, such as encouraging parking sharing, setting a floor-area-ratio (FAR) classified and location-differentiated parking requirement, coordinating the parking supply with transit accessibility, and advocating a fine-grained street network.