Analysis of Parking Performance of Public Off-Street Parks in Baghdad City

Abstract

Parking is an important part of the transport system and its problems, especially in the capitals of countries, are due to dense traffic, business districts, private vehicle use, and the number of population as compared to the area of cities. The purposes of the study are assessing of the efficiency of parking operation including Parking Index (PI), Parking Duration (PD) and Parking Turnovers (PT). The study area included four parks was to be selected in Baghdad city in Iraq based on the advantages of the land use, two in Al-Karkh area and the others in Al-Rusafa area. Parking data were surveyed manually to evaluate parking performance of each park depending on initial questionnaires and previous data. Arrival-Departure method is used for evaluating PI, PD, and PT which express the case of parking efficiency. It showed that PI is 57.00, 97.72, 39.39 and 35.71%, also PD is 41.71, 43.11, 42.67 and 38.88 min, in addition that PT is 0.82, 1.36, 0.55, 0.55 veh/space for P1, P2, P3 and P4 respectively. The study showed that P1 and P2 operated below the maximum capacity at PI lower than 50%, it also gave the indication that P2 sometimes operates with an overcapacity, this may due to bad management of the park in addition to the non-properly use for the electronic system which controls on entrance gates. Furthermore, it showed that P3 and P4 operated above the maximum capacity complying with policy 7 of the parking space requirements in parking code guidance 2012 of San Francisco Department of Transportation.