This guide walks through how you can determine the number of parking spaces needed for a new residential development using Kinesis. If you are new to Kinesis, we suggest checking our Getting started guide.
What to consider
Building parking for new residential developments, specifically underground parking, can add significant construction costs and delay completion. Getting the number of parking spaces for developments right is important. You want to provide enough parking for future residents that need it. But you also want to be able to offer potential buyers that don't own cars competitive prices, and save on the additional time and cost that too many parking spaces require.
The type of dwelling and number of bedrooms might indicate the number of people living in a dwelling, and the number of cars they will own. But we've found that accessibility to public transport is one of the biggest drivers of car ownership and should be considered when planning for how many car spaces to build in a new development. Kinesis' Parking app predicts the number of car spaces needed for a new development based on the dwelling counts and the location's public transport accessibility.
Create your workspace
To determine the number of parking spaces needed for a development, create a new workspace and add the Parking app by Kinesis. The Accessibility app is also added as a dependency.
Build your scenario
In your baseline scenario, create a new location for your planned development. For example, the scenario below shows a single location in Rhodes, NSW Australia. You can create additional locations as needed.
Next, describe how many dwellings of each type you're planning to build with the Usage attribute.
Tip: If you're in the early stages of planning and don't have detailed information on the exact distribution between dwelling typologies, you can enter the total number of dwellings on the category level as above, which automatically distributes the dwellings.
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.
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.
Parking spaces
The Parking app predicts the number of parking spaces needed for a development based on its public transport accessibility.
Parking spaces are provided for each:
- Location
- Usage type: each Usage attribute item (e.g. Mid-rise — 1 bedroom)
- 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).
Parking innovations
The results above provide a baseline for the number of car spaces required for a residential development based on the location's public transport accessibility. There are a number of trends and innovations that further affect car ownership and need to be considered. An increase in car-share and ride-share usage in recent years has reduced the need to own a car, and has particularly reduced ownership of second or third cars.
New parking innovations such as unbundled and decoupled parking can also lower car ownership rates and parking energy requirements. Unbundled parking is when car spaces are sold separately to housing units, and can lead to both a decrease in parking requirements and lower housing prices. Decoupled parking is when parking is provided in a separate, but close by, location to housing. Decoupled parking can also be adapted for other uses when it is no longer required for parking.