This guide walks through how you can develop accessibility-based parking policies using Kinesis. If you are new to Kinesis, we suggest checking our Getting started guide.
Why accessibility-based parking policy?
Parking policies are in place to ensure that car owners have enough space to park their cars. These policies should be designed only to meet demand, not exceed it. The provision of too many car spaces have negative impacts on society and the environment.
Accessibility to public transport is one of the biggest drivers of car ownership and should be used by parking policies to determine the number of spaces required. Kinesis' Parking app provides accessibility-based, location-specific and up-to-date recommended residential parking rates for anywhere in Australia*.
Create your workspace
To start developing your new parking policy, create a new workspace and add the Parking app by Kinesis. The Accessibility app is also added as a dependency.
Building your scenario
Setting up the scope of the policy
First, decide on the scope of your parking policy. Is it for a specific precinct? A city or equivalent local government entity? Which dwelling typologies are relevant? The Parking app produces recommended parking rates within a 1km radius of each location. You can create additional locations to understand surrounding areas or cover a bigger area like a city.
For example, the scenario below shows locations that cover North Sydney local government area in NSW Australia.
Tip: If you have multiple projects that use the same locations/area, you can set up a workspace with these locations. The next time you need to create a new workspace with the same locations, you can simply import them from the workspace you created previously.
Next, in the Usage attribute for any of the locations, enter values for the dwelling typologies you want to determine parking rates for.
Tip: If you don't have any specific number of dwellings that you're modelling and only after the rates, you can simply enter any value like 1 dwelling for each of the relevant dwelling typologies.
You can also create your own Usage items in the settings. Make sure you set the Space type, Average space per dwelling, and Number of bedrooms.
Modelling a specific development
The Parking app can also tell you the number of car spaces you'll need for a certain development. If you want to set up hypothetical or planned developments in this workspace to illustrate some examples for your parking policy, check out our guide on Parking spaces for new developments.
Interpreting results
Public transport accessibility level (PTAL)
The Accessibility app provides the public transport accessibility level (PTAL) of a location and the surrounding area. PTAL measures how well a place is connected to public transport services. There are nine possible values of PTAL: 0, 1a, 1b, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6a and 6b. A PTAL of 0 means there are no nearby public transport services, and 6b represents the best accessibility.
A screenshot showing a board provided by the Accessibility app.
Parking rates
The Parking app provides recommended parking rates, or parking spaces per dwelling, based on the area's public transport accessibility.
Parking rates are provided for each:
- Location: either a location you have added, or a hexagon (~10 hectares) showing the surrounding area.
- Usage type: each Usage attribute item (e.g. Mid-rise — 1 bedroom) defined in your scenario.
- Prediction type: Average, Low and High rates. Statistically, 95% of places with a given PTAL score should fall between the Low and High rates.
- Model type: predictions based on car ownership trends in a given place (e.g. Australia, New York).
The hexagon map below shows a specific area where the average recommended parking rate for a 1 bedroom mid-rise apartment, based on car ownership trends in Australia, is 0.63 parking spaces per dwelling.
A screenshot showing a board provided by the Parking app. The 'Parking rates' visualisation is selected, and the toolbox shows how you can interact with the data that is displayed.
Historical car ownership rates
The Parking app also provides car ownership rates (cars per dwelling) for Australia from the 2016 Census. These rates have been downloaded from the Australian Bureau of Statistics at Statistical Area Level 2 (SA2).
Shaping parking policy
How you take these results to shape your parking policy depends on the parking policy's goals. Some policies aim to reduce car traffic and promote walking, cycling and public transport use, while others aim to simply meet parking demand.
Identifying car/parking-free zones
Results from the Accessibility app can be used to determine areas that are highly accessible to public transport and other services. These areas have low car dependencies, and can respond well to policies that set maximum parking rates, or allow no off-street parking to be built.
Determining specific parking requirements
You can use the 'Low' and 'High' predictions as a guide for determining specific parking rates to include in planning controls. For example, if you want to constrain parking supply to drive some of the outcomes mentioned above, you might want to set a maximum rate that's lower than the 'High' prediction.
Benchmarking parking rates with similar areas
You can compare your predicted or current rates with historical car ownership rates or predicted parking rates of other similar areas. You can do this by creating a scenario and creating locations in the areas you wish to compare.
Further resources
North Sydney example
To see an example of you can set up a workspace to get parking rates for a city or region, check our North Sydney Parking workspace.
Accessibility to other services
In this guide, we talked about developing a parking policy in the context of accessibility to public transport services. You can also take into account accessibility to other services such as schools, shops and parks. The Accessibility app can calculate distance to services as well as number of dwellings within 400m, 800m and 2,000m of various services.
* If you'd like to explore parking rates for another country or city — get in touch at support@kinesis.org.