To Park or To Develop: Trade-Off in Rail Transit Passenger Demand

Abstract

Rail transit systems often provide park-and-ride facilities as a way for passengers to access stations. Using the land around stations for development rather than parking would allow more passengers to access the system without driving and ostensibly go much further toward reducing dependence on automobiles. However, it is unclear whether ridership levels can be maintained without a park-and-ride option. This research seeks to illuminate this issue with a demand model for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. Passenger counts are estimated for each origin/destination pair in the BART system based on such variables as parking spaces, housing units, and employment adjacent to stations. Parameters from this model are then used to estimate the amount of development required to replace the riders generated by station parking. Depending on the characteristics of a station and its spatial relationship with other stations, the level of development density required to effectively replace parking is found to be much higher than what is generally feasible.

A Twenty-Five-Year Biography of the TOD Concept: From Design to Policy, Planning, and Implementation

“…Specific subfields look at transit use and transit trip generation in particular (Dill 2008;Faghri and Venigalla 2013;Hendricks 2005;Lund 2006), nonwork travel (Greenwald 2003;Nelson, Niles, and Hibshoosh 2001), reduced parking requirements as travel demand management strategy (Arrington and Cervero 2008;Daisa 2004;Duncan 2010;Ewing et al 2017), and more recently, housing policies and VMT (Palm and Niemeier 2016). Even though pedestrianoriented Design was one of the first three Ds, only recently have the effect of TOD on nonmotorized travel been assessed.…”

The Effectiveness of Park-and-Ride as a Policy Measure for More Sustainable Mobility

“…Ultimately, as suggested in the analysis of effects above, P&R-dependent spatial forms may be designed or may emerge, so that users would be unable to sustain their established mobility patterns in the absence of P&R capacity, and spatial forms which would not otherwise be functional are permitted. In addition to the spatial economic concept of the most accessible land being that most desired by commerce, a more practical planning conflict is that P&R facilities compete for the same space around suburban stations that would otherwise be particularly attractive for the 'transit-oriented development' sought by integrated transport and spatial planning initiatives (Duncan, 2010). Such facilities can also create urban design and environmental impact conflicts through consequences including increased rainwater run-off from the hard surfaces, light intrusion and loss of undeveloped space, and the physical extent of P&R car parks is often a factor in exacerbating such effects.…”

Developing a tool for assessing park-and-ride facilities in a sustainable mobility perspective

“…This can be understood as P&R causing displacement of activities to more car-dependent locations, contributing to increased traffic. Transformation of areas close to town centres and stations with more housing and work-places could also generate more passengers with easy access to the public transit service by foot and bicycle (Duncan, 2010).…”