Parking is a hot button issue in cities.
Cities have been providing free (and underpriced) on-street parking since the advent of the automobile, and, no surprise, people like FREE, even when it's a scarce resource and they have to cruise for it!
Making it even harder, is the perception that politicians are "taking away" public parking and "giving" (or even selling) it to private carshare companies, especially when the parking space is in front of your home or business — even though the private company is serving the residents of the area!
Consequently, it can be hard to get a city to designate on-street parking for carsharing. (In this posting I'm talking about reserved on-street parking for "round trip" carsharing services. One-way/free floating carshaing is a related but different issue.) The way these policies are implemented in each city depends on specific verbiage in the city's legal code framework.
Here are some resources:
On-Street Parking Spaces for Shared Cars,
Access Magazine, University of California, 2010
Good general overview of reserved on-street parking for carsharing.
Best practices in CS parking: Carsharing and Public Parking Policies: Assessing Benefits, Costs, and Best Practices in North America
Susan A. Shaheen, Ph.D. et al., Mineta Transportation Institute, March 2010
This paper outlines 3 strategies a city might take:
- Support CS with "free" parking because it's a public good (this is often done in the "pilot" stage)
- Charge either the market price for reserved parking spaces or charge the "lost revenue from parking meters" (this is the most common)
- Same as above but build in some sort of revenue-sharing mechanism when the operator meets some threshold.
Three Ways Cities Are Using On-Street Parking Pilots to Expand Carsharing,
Shared Use Mobility Center, 2015
Basically, a brief summary of how San Francisco and Seattle are handling the allocation on-street parking in their cities. (The 3rd city, Boston, was in the RFP stage at the time the article was written.)
Car Sharing at a Mile High,
International Parking Institute, November 2013
A detailed discussion of how Denver is implementing carsharing parking.
Build Your Own Mobility Hub: 7 Lessons for Cities from Bremen, Germany
By Tim Frisbie, Shared Use Mobility Center, June 16, 2017
The "Mobility Hub" concept places carsharing vehicles at/near other transit services, such as bikesharing, subway stations and major bus interchanges. This describes the efforts by the City of Bremen, Germany in integrating carsharing in the overall transportation network of the city.
Carsharing: Establishing its Role in the Parking Demand Management Toolbox
Masters thesis submitted by Gina Filosa, Tufts University, 2006
A detailed discussion of where carsharing fits into the overall parking management strategy.
Hope these are useful. Let me know if there are other articles or website you've found useful.
