Parking is the act of stopping a vehicle and leaving it unoccupied for more than a brief time. It is against the law virtually everywhere to park a vehicle in the middle of a highway or road; parking on one or both sides of a road, however, is commonly permitted. Parking facilities are constructed in combination with most buildings, to facilitate the coming and going of the buildings' users.
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Parking facilities
Parking facilities include indoor and outdoor private property belonging to a house, the side of the road where metered or laid-out for such use, a parking lot or car park, indoor and outdoor multi-level structures, and shared underground parking facilities. In the U.S., after the first public parking garage was opened in Boston, May 24, 1898, livery stables in urban centers began to be converted into garages. In cities of the Eastern US, many former livery stables, with lifts for carriages, continue to operate as garages today. The following terms give regional variations. All except carport refer to outdoor multi-level parking facilities. In some regional dialects, some of these phrases refer also to indoor or single-level facilities.
- Parking ramp (used in some parts of the upper Midwest, especially Minneapolis, but sometimes seen as far east as Buffalo, New York). Elsewhere, the term "ramp" would apply to the inclines between floors of a parking garage, but not to the entire structure itself.
- Multi-storey car park
- Car park (UK, Hong Kong)
- Parkade (Canada, South Africa)
- Parking structure (Western U.S.)
- Parking garage (Canada and USA, where this term does not always distinguish between outdoor above-ground multi-level parking and indoor underground parking.
- Parking deck (Eastern USA, an outdoor above-ground multi-level parking facility)
- Carport (open-air single-level covered parking)
Modes of parking
There are three basic modes of parking, based on the arrangement of vehicles — parallel parking, perpendicular parking, and angle parking. These are self-park configurations where the vehicle driver is able to access the parking independently. Besides these basic modes of parking, there are instances where a more ad hoc approach to arranging vehicles is appropriate. For example, in parts of some large cities, such as Chicago, where land is expensive and therefore parking space is at a premium, there are parking lots where the driver leaves the keys to the vehicle with an attendant who arranges vehicles so as to maximize the number of vehicles that can be parked in the lot. Vehicles may be packed up to five vehicles deep in combinations of perpendicular and/or parallel parking with limited circulation aisles for the parking attendant. Such arrangements are known as attendant parking. When the lot or facility is provided to serve the customers of a business, it is considered valet parking. Inner city parking lots are often temporary, the operators renting land which is vacant pending the construction of a new office building. Some inner city lots are equipped with individual lifts, allowing cars to be stored above each other. Another ad hoc arrangement is tandem parking. This is sometimes done with residential parking where two vehicles park nose-to-end in tandem. The first vehicle does not have independent access, and the second vehicle must move to provide access. As with attendant parking, the purpose is to maximize the number of vehicles that can park in a limited space.
Parallel parking
With parallel parking, cars are arranged in a line, with the front bumper of one car facing the back bumper of an adjacent one. This is done parallel to a curb, when one is provided. Parallel parking is the most common mode of streetside parking. It may also be used in parking lots and parking structures, but usually only to supplement parking spaces that use the other modes.
Perpendicular parking
With perpendicular parking, cars are parked side to side, perpendicular to an aisle, curb, or wall. This mode of parking is more scalable than parallel parking and is therefore commonly used in parking lots and parking structures. Often, in parking lots using perpedicular parking, two rows of parking spaces may be arranged front to front, with aisles in between.
Angle parking
Angle parking is similar to perpendicular parking, except that cars are arranged at an angle to the aisle (an acute angle with the direction of approach). The gentler turn allows easier and quicker parking, narrower aisles, and thus higher density than perpendicular parking. While in theory the aisles are one way, in practice they are typically wide enough to allow two cars to pass slowly when drivers go down the aisles the wrong way. Angle parking is very common in parking lots. It may also be used in streetside parking when there is more width available for parking than would be needed for parallel parking, as it creates a larger number of parking spaces. Some cities have utilized angled parking on-street (as compared to off-street parking facilities). This has been done mostly in residential, retail and mixed use areas where additional parking compared to parallel parking is desired and traffic volumes are lower. Most angled parking is design in a head-in configuration while a few cities (Seattle and Portland are examples) have some back-in angled parking (typically on hills or low traffic volume streets).
Economics of parking
In congested urban areas parking can be a time consuming and expensive proposition. Urban planners must consider whether and how to accommodate or 'demand manage' potentially large numbers of vehicles in small geographic areas. Usually the authorities set minimum, or more rarely maximum, numbers of parking spaces for new housing and commercial developments, and may also plan its location and distribution to influence its convenience and accessibility. The costs or subsidies of such parking accommodations can become a heated point in local politics. For example, in 2006 the San Francisco Board of Supervisors considered a controversial zoning plan to limit the number of parking spaces available in new residential developments. [1] Where parking spaces are a scarce commodity, and owners have not made suitable arrangements for their own parking, ad hoc overspill parking often takes place along sections of road where there is no planned scheme by a municipal authority to formally allocate roadspace to the car. Heated social discourse sometimes revolves around the sense of "ownership" that informally arises amongst individuals displaying overspill parking behaviour. For example, during the winter of 2005 in Boston, the practice of some people saving convenient overspill roadway for themselves, became controversial. At that time, many Boston regions had a tradition that if a person shoveled the snow out of a roadspace, that person could claim ownership of that space with some kind of marker (e.g. a chair or orange cone) in the space. [2] However, city government defied that custom and cleared markers out of spaces. [3] Indeed, parking space in Boston is such a rare commodity that in 2006 a single parking space sold for $250,000. [4] Festivals and sporting events often spawn a cottage industry of parking. Homeowners, schools, and businesses often make extra money by charging a flat rate fee for all-day parking during the event. Donald C. Shoup in 2005 argued in his The High Cost of Free Parking against the large consumption of land and other resources in urban and suburban areas for parking. [5]
Amount of parking
Parking generation
Parking Generation refers to a document produced by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) that assembles a vast array of parking demand observations predominately from the United States. It summarizes the amount of parking observed with various land uses at different times of the day/week/month/year including the peak parking demand. While it has been assailed by some planners for lack of data in urban settings, it stands as the single largest accumulation of actual parking demand data related to land use. Anyone can submit parking demand data for inclusion. The report is updated approximately every 5 to 10 years.
Parking quotes
- "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot" Joni Mitchell from "Crowind Now Way of Life in California," Los Angeles Times, June 10, 2001. B-1
- "Parking is like sex. Why should I pay for it? If I apply myself a little, I can have it for free!" George Costanza in Seinfeld.
See also
- Alternate side parking
- Automatic parking
- Car condo
- Decriminalised parking enforcement
- Disc parking
- Double parking
- Garage parking
- Lovers' lane
- Overspill parking
- Parallel parking
- Parking lot
- Parking meter
- Parking space
- Parking violation
- Park and ride
- Pullthrough
- Residential zoned parking
- Valet parking
- Parking Guidance and Information Systems
