Death by a thousand curb-cuts: Evidence on the effect of minimum parking requirements on the choice to drive

摘要

Little research has been done to understand the effect of guaranteed parking at home-in a driveway or garage-on mode choice. The research presented here systematically examines neighborhoods in the three New York City boroughs for which residential, off-street parking is possible but potentially scarce. The research is conducted in two stages. Stage one is based on a Google Earth© survey of over 2000 properties paired with the City's tax lot database. The survey and tax lot information serve as the basis to estimate on-site parking for New York City neighborhoods. With parking availability estimated, a generalized linear model using census tracts as the unit of analysis, is used to estimate the maximum likelihood parameters that predict the proportion of residents who drive to work in the Manhattan Core. The research shows a clear relationship between guaranteed parking at home and a greater propensity to use the automobile for journey to work trips even between origin and destinations pairs that are reasonably well and very well served by transit. Because journey to work trips to the downtown are typically well served by transit, we infer from this finding that non-journey to work trips are also made disproportionately by car from these areas of high on-site parking.