Commercial Vehicle Parking in Downtown Seattle: Insights on the Battle for the Curb

Abstract

Rapid urban growth puts pressure on local governments to rethink how they manage street curb parking. Competition for space among road users and lack of adequate infrastructure force delivery drivers either to search for vacant spaces or to park in unsuitable areas, which negatively impacts road capacity and causes inconvenience to other users of the road. The purpose of this paper is to advance research by providing data-based insight into what is actually happening at the curb. To achieve this objective, the research team developed and implemented a data collection method to quantify the usage of curb space in the densest urban area of Seattle, Center City. This study captures the parking behavior of commercial vehicles everywhere along the block face as well as the parking activities of all vehicles (including passenger vehicles) in commercial vehicle loading zones. Based on the empirical findings, important characteristics of Seattle’s urban freight parking operations are described, including a detailed classification of vehicle types, dwell time distribution, and choice of curb use for parking (e.g., authorized and unauthorized spaces). The relationship between land use and commercial vehicle parking operations at the curb is discussed. Seattle’s parking management initiatives will benefit from the insights into current behavior gained from this research.

Understanding Urban Commercial Vehicle Driver Behaviors and Decision Making

“…These findings are in line with previous literature (6,(8)(9)(10). Previous empirical studies have observed percentages of parking events in the travel lane between 1.3% and 2.8%, with most observed parking occurring in authorized or unauthorized curb spaces.…”

“…Instead, most parking citations were a result of other infractions, such as expired meters or parking in curb spaces reserved for other vehicles. While parking citation records reflect only unauthorized parking events, other papers have studied parking choice by collecting field data, recording both authorized and unauthorized parking events (4,9,10). These studies found that most parking events took place at the curb (in both authorized and unauthorized curb spaces), and only between 1.3% and 4% of observed drivers chose to park in the travel lane.…”

Estimating the benefits of dedicated unloading bays by field experimentation

“…An important reason is poor designation; signs may be hidden or poorly painted on the wall. Furthermore, many taxis or rideshares falsely interpret a freight-unloading bay as intended for passenger loading and unloading (as also documented by Girón-Valderrama et al (2019) for Seattle). Another, and very important, reason is extensive illegal parking of passenger vehicles in bays.…”

“…In their paper, they also argue that virtually all prior parking research has been focused on passenger vehicles rather than freight vehicles. A series of innovative recent papers document commercial parking behavior and effects based on extensive fieldwork in downtown Seattle (Girón-Valderrama et al, 2019;Dalla Chiara and Goodchild, 2020;Jashami et al, 2020), documenting and addressing issues like the impact on other traffic, illegal parking, and the extensive cruising as a consequence of shortages in commercial parking availability. A limited but growing number of papers develop optimization or (micro-)simulation models of loading/unloading bays in urban environments (e.g., Alho et al, 2014;Muñuzuri et al, 2017;Iwan et al, 2018), while (Marcucci and Gatta, 2014) and Nourinejad et al (2014) elicit preferences of the various actors around unloading bays.…”

Exploring Swedish urban freight stakeholders' interests in public spaces

“…Urban Freight Stakeholders (UFS) have different and sometimes conflicting interests in public space (Ballantyne et al, 2013;Machado-León et al, 2020;Pitera et al, 2017), which are affected by the infrastructural capacity limitation of the space (Girón-Valderrama et al, 2019;Machado-León et al, 2020) and the growth of urban population (Ivanov & Goodchild, 2018). According to Ballantyne et al (2013) UFS are all actors that have a direct impact on city-planning of urban freight.…”