The impact of the built environment on on-street car parking duration

On-street car parking policy is a key instrument for car regulation and urban space management. However, the design of effective parking policies is challenging, as it requires an understanding of on-street parking behavior and its determinants. The existing literature has widely examined how the built environment affects parking volumes, but there is limited research on its influence on parking durations. This study fills this gap by examining the relationships between parking durations and four dimensions of the built environment (density, design, diversity, and distance). This research relies on a semi-parametric modeling approach and uses parking payment transactions from Lyon, France. Parking pricing design is found to play a central role in shaping parking duration by explaining 74% of the deviance of parking durations, followed by density (19% of the deviance) and diversity (less than 3%). These effects are, however, mostly nonlinear and their magnitude varies between weekends and weekdays. These results can provide valuable guidance to policymakers in promoting more efficient parking management approaches.