PARKING POLICIES AND COMMUTER CAR SHARING

This paper presents a study designed to establish the potential for journey-to-work car sharing, at a workplace where staff would be offered discriminatory parking places as incentives. If employers in urban areas widely adopted such an initiative, it would offer the potential to reduce: (1) traffic flows in urban areas; (2) employees' travel costs; and (3) the demand for parking spaces at a workplace. A survey of the staff of the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, was conducted as a case study of the feasibility of such a workplace initiative. The paper describes the background to the study, the methods used, and the main findings. The University provides just over 900 on-campus parking spaces for its staff, but it issued 2040 parking permits for the academic year 1993-94. With a few special exceptions (e.g. registered disabled drivers), access to parking is first come, first served. As it was not feasible to increase the number of parking spaces, two possible car-sharing policies were investigated: (1) reserved spaces for car-sharers; and (2) permit price discrimination in favour of car-sharers. Staff were surveyed to determine their attitudes to these schemes. The survey's results indicated staff reluctance to share cars, and unlikeliness to share cars in the event of a discriminatory policy.