Local Researchers Discover One Weird Trick To Cure Scooter Parking Problems
Researchers at the University of Oregon’s Urbanism Next Center have published a study, using real-world Lime data from a dozen cities in the United States and Europe, that provides best practice recommendations for shared scooter parking.
Studies have repeatedly found that the vast majority of scooters are parked properly, and that they are far more likely to be parked properly than cars (see this study, and another, and another). Yet scooter parking concerns remain an important area for cities and scooter companies to address, to ensure sidewalks are accessible to all.
To that end, cities have begun to experiment with new parking technologies like parking corrals or requiring physical locks. But with these new approaches, planners have been left to wonder: how many parking corrals or bike racks need to be in place to meet demand and reduce non-compliance?
That question has been left unanswered, until now.
The Urbanism Next report identifies three best practices through their research:
Provide sufficient parking corrals - within a 1 minute walk - to meet demand and maximize parking compliance.
Ensure parking corral coverage is consistent and comprehensive to avoid gaps in parking coverage and resulting parking non-compliance.
Provide enough parking spaces within corrals to accommodate parking demand in different land uses.
1. Provide sufficient parking corrals - within a 1 minute walk.
The researchers tested different factors that might lead to higher parking demand or lower parking compliance - the density of a neighborhood, how many points of interest were in the area, the layout of the roads, and more.
The most important factor? Providing plentiful parking corrals. Areas with higher parking density have higher parking compliance, even when taking into account other factors.
Importantly, the relationship shows a distinct pattern: rates of parking compliance improve dramatically from low density until about 20-30 parking corrals per square kilometer (about 50 to 80 per square mile), at which point additional parking corral density provides diminishing returns.
Twenty-five corrals evenly spaced within a square kilometer results in one corral every 200 meters, so riders would never be further from a corral than about 100 meters, which is a roughly 1-minute walk.
2. Ensure parking corral coverage is consistent and comprehensive.
While cities could achieve a high density of parking corrals by gathering them all in one place, Increased parking coverage reduces parking non-compliance by minimizing the walking distance from parking corrals, highlighting the need for well-planned corral distribution.
In other words, cities would benefit from focusing not just on average parking density across a wide area, but also on maintaining a consistent density across the service area, rather than clusters of parking availability surrounded by parking “deserts”. To avoid large gaps in parking availability, we recommend planners focus on low-parking-density areas (less than 20 corrals per square kilometer) to ensure sufficient parking coverage.
3. Provide enough parking spaces within corrals to accommodate parking demand in different land uses.
The Urbanism Next research team tested whether parking compliance and demand changed in different neighborhoods. They found that riders are willing to walk a similar distance to park a scooter, regardless of if they are parking in a residential neighborhood or in a bustling commercial district.
However, different neighborhood types require different parking capacities within a parking corral. Specifically, mixed-use, leisure, and tourism areas should have higher capacity corrals that can accommodate more parked scooters. Using commercial areas as the reference, we suggest providing 80% more parking spaces in leisure areas, 65% more spaces in mixed-use, and tourism areas, 30% more spaces in transit and office areas, the same number of spaces per corral in public areas, and 25% fewer spaces in residential areas.
Want to learn more? Dig into the full report.
