Dive Brief:
- Drivers in some large North American cities have less than a 60% chance of finding available on-street parking downtown on a given block, transportation analytics company Inrix found in an Oct. 7 report.
- Average availability rates are higher in Southern states, ranging from 46% in Miami to 62% in Dallas. Drivers in Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., have less than a 40% chance of finding on-street parking, while Philadelphia’s average availability is 27% and New York City’s is 19%.
- At $31.80 per hour, New York City’s downtown area has the highest off-street per-hour parking fees among 46 U.S. and Canadian cities, according to the report.
Dive Insight:
Parking availability and pricing can impact traffic congestion, commercial deliveries, access to downtown businesses and transportation planning, Inrix said.
The report studied on- and off-street parking availability, parking rates and curb management for robotaxis and delivery vehicles. The report’s high-level parking information allows cities to ask questions and benchmark their performance against peer cities, Inrix Chief Product Officer Ahmed Darrat told Smart Cities Dive.
In many U.S. cities, off-street parking costs far more than on-street parking. While off-street parking in Chicago averages $22.93 per hour, on-street parking there costs $6.24. “Canada and the United States are known for relatively high costs of off-street parking, reflecting the market demand for this scarce resource in downtown areas,” the report states.
Robotaxis that keep moving between rider pickups may add up to 60% more vehicle miles traveled than those that park, according to a research report based on a simulation model of 1,700 shared autonomous vehicles in San Francisco published in ScienceDirect in August. While a robotaxi may occupy a parking spot for a short time between rides, “that's a more productive use of the curb than a private vehicle parking there” for longer periods, Darrat said.
