Appropriate Parking Management Strategy for Successful Transit Oriented Development

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2012Abstract While Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) has gained currency in the United States as a means of countering sprawl, promoting smart growth, vitalizing local economy and expanding life choices over the last two decades, it is still not commonly practiced. One major challenge to implementing a TOD is parking: well-managed parking can improve the performance of a TOD in both transportation and financial perspectives; poorly-managed parking can undermine the expected benefits of a TOD and even cause the initiative to fail. Currently, most jurisdictions use "minimum parking requirements" to manage parking in general, but this highly-flawed practice could easily lead to the oversupply of parking and thus impair the intended effects of TOD. The main purpose of this study is to identify and then propose multiple specific parking management strategies for successful TOD. Three other issues will also be addressed in this thesis: 1) Definition of TOD, 2) Effects of parking on TOD's success and 3) Defects of conventional parking requirements. Finally, the thesis presents a "Parking Study" of 25 selected TOD housing projects in King County and examines its main findings by reviewing the existing parking provisions, and compares them with proposed parking management strategies. Implementation of these innovative strategies is the real challenge of TOD's parking management, and based on that, the thesis provides several recommendations as well as potential issues for future research