CTECH Video Transcript – Characterization of University Parking System. Most universities are constantly challenged by the parking congestion problem. As one of the initial steps towards finding solutions to this problem, CTECH has funded the year 2 research project on university parking. The objectives of this project are;
1) To understand the parking demand and management strategies at four university campuses;
2) To identify innovative solutions that has been applied to various universities across the country;
3) To propose a framework to analyze the relationship between parking management and its
benefits on the environment and community health.
In the first part of the study four CTECH university members namely Cornell University, The University of Texas at El Paso, University of California at Davis and University of South Florida were selected, and their parking characteristics, congestion problems, sustainability efforts, and intelligent transportation systems applications were analyzed and compared. Second part of the study surveyed innovative parking management practices in more than 300 universities that have student population of over 10,000. Some of the common practices done by university parking offices are, zoning, pricing and implementation of ITS technologies. Zoning is a powerful method to distribute the demand, based on the available supply. To encourage parking outside the central area, some universities allow commuter students or employees to park at remote zones for free. Another way to minimize demand problem, some universities assign overflow lots for the permit owners. ITS technologies allow universities to verify parking permits and issue citations effectively. For example, by using License Plate Recognition system, some universities no longer need to issue physical parking permits. Some use this system in a limited way by means of enforcement. University parking offices want to ensure some of their facilities remain readily accessible for approved vehicles. Barrier with permit identification system at a parking lot’s access point is an effective way to minimize illegal entries. In addition to the LPR system as discussed, Radio frequency identification tags and readers are commonly used. For parking, data collection means obtaining information on parking lot occupancy. Collected data can be shared with the users or be used. Such statistics used to be collected manually. With the help technology, universities can collect real‐time parking information and feed them to a system that can be shared. To go one step further, universities can install sensors on the surface or the ceiling of parking stalls to detect the presence of parked vehicles. One other way to detect parked vehicles is to use image processing. The last part which is parking, environment and its relationship between community health focuses on developing a framework to analyze the relationships. For a university community, the total or average distance of all travelers before and after the change in a transportation management policy can be compared to evaluate the policy’s impact on community health. Because of the time and budget available for this project, we have chosen to focus on establishing a framework to estimate the emission due to a change in policy. For this study, a modeling framework first involved the VISSIM microscopic traffic simulation followed by CMEM which is the acronym of Comprehensive Modal Emissions Model have been proposed. This combined VISSIM followed by CMEM approach estimates the emissions and calculates the consumption of the fuel from the individual vehicle. From which we can combine to form total campus statistics. The university campus chosen for this demonstration of this VISSIM and CMEM combined approach is the UTEP campus. The scenario was to estimate the CO2 emission caused by all the commuting vehicles coming to the campus in the morning peak period between 8 to 9 a.m. on the weekday. From the simulation results, CMEM estimated that on average the CO2 emission was 9.22 g/vehicle‐mile.