HKUST Public Policy Bulletin Issue No.10

Factors Influencing Shared Parking Use in Time and Space: A Case Study in Guangzhou

 

Juan Wang and Pengyu Zhu

 

 

In big cities, parking difficulties have caused great distress to citizens and transport authorities. To reduce these problems, parking management initiatives aimed at increasing the utilization rate of public parking spaces have been applied, while the utilization rate of privately owned parking spaces remains low during their idle time. Thus, shared parking, which enables private owners to share their parking spaces during their idle time, would possibly contribute to alleviating the urban parking shortage. In recent years, with the rise of the sharing economy and the maturity of information communication technology (ICT), the concept of shared parking re-emerged, emphasizing shared parking users can reserve parking spaces and pay online through intelligent platforms.

 

Despite researchers’ attention to such an innovative and sustainable way to relieve parking pressure, the implementation of shared parking in the real world remains at the planning stage in a lot of cities for reasons like legalization disputes, which also explains why there is little research on the use features of shared parking. Compared with the conservative attitude towards sharing parking in some countries, China pioneers in shared parking legislation and implementation, particularly in big cities in the most need of utilization rate enhancement. This policy bulletin summarizes a study by Wang, J., & Zhu, P. (2024) that uses data from 121 shared parking lots in Guangzhou, China to analyze the influence of a set of explanatory factors on shared parking use.

     

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    Authors

     

    Juan WANG is an advisor and researcher in the field of sustainable mobility and transport. She received her PhD in Urban and Transportation department in Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands. Dr. Wang was a postdoctoral researcher at HKUST (GZ) and HKUST (CWB). She is currently an advisor at HetEnergieBureau B.V., Eindhoven, Netherlands. She is passionate about contributing to policy development, and translating research into practical applications in order to promote sustainable transportation use and improve the urban living environment. She has so far focused on sustainable transportation mode choices, shared transportation, EV charging station allocation, and transportation satisfaction. Meanwhile, she worked on the interaction of transportation strategy and urban land use management. She is a specialist in quantitative analysis, spatial analysis, and computational simulation.

     

     

     

    Pengyu ZHU is Associate Professor in the Division of Public Policy at HKUST. His research focuses on 1) travel behavior, location choice, implications for economic and environmental issues; 2) links between transportation infrastructure, housing market, and economic developments; 3) urban planning and policy decision-making by spatio-temporal big data analytics. His work has been published in major academic journals such as Landscape and Urban Planning, Urban Studies, Annals of Regional Sciences, Transportation, Transportation Research Part D, Urban Geography, Cities, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology. He was also among the world’s top 2% scientists in 2023 and top 1% in 2024, based on TopResearchersList.com ranking by Elsevier and Stanford University. In recognition of his academic excellence, Prof. Zhu has been recently awarded 5.2 million HKD and conferred the esteemed title of ‘RGC Research Fellow’.

     

    Further reading

    Wang, Juan & Zhu, Pengyu. (2024). The distribution of shared parking use in time and space: A case study in Guangzhou, China. Journal of Transport and Land Use. 17. 603-623.