Promoting road safety in urban environments requires an understanding of the factors that create hazardous road conditions. Illegal parking can cause a wide range of safety concerns, from blocking driver sightlines at crosswalks to obstructing bike lanes causing cyclists to enter vehicle traffic. Some of the causes of illegal parking have been studied before but there appears to be a gap in the literature regarding the influence of on-street parking occupancy on illegal parking.
The relationship between on-street parking location occupancy and illegal parking is examined in this paper using two data sources. First, on-street parking payment transaction data for locations managed by the Toronto Parking Authority is used to determine parking location occupancy. Second, parking infraction data from the City of Toronto is used to examine the prevalence of illegal parking activity.
The study starts with identifying the five streets of each road type (arterial, collector, and local) within downtown Toronto that have the most parking infractions. The locations were selected only from downtown Toronto to help control for external factors (e.g., traffic volumes). From there, parking infractions that occurred adjacent to paid on-street parking and that have potential safety implications are selected for further analysis. The parking infractions are then paired with the occupancy percentage of the adjacent paid on-street parking location at the time the infraction occurred. Finally, frequency distribution graphs were produced of the number of parking infractions versus adjacent parking location occupancy. Some modifications were made to the frequency distribution graphs to control for the different number of parking infractions between scenarios and frequency of different parking location occupancies. Also, linear regression to determine the trends within the frequency distribution graphs.
Overall, there appears to be a positive relationship between parking location occupancy and parking infractions that are potential road safety concerns. For different times of the week, weekday mornings, afternoons, and evening were analyzed but no weekend times were examined due to minimal data. All three times periods showed statistically significant relationships but parking location occupancy had the strongest effect during weekday evenings. For the three types of road classification examined within the study (arterial, collector, and local), only collector roads showed a statistically significant relationship.
The findings show that there is a positive effect on road safety as on-street parking demand decreases. This emphasizes the need for on-street parking demand to be managed through location and time appropriate pricing.
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