Managing space at trip ends has become one of the most important elements of transport planning with the continued increase in car use.

Planners have to balance sometimes competing aims of ensuring adequate provision, equitable distribution, access to facilities, and using parking policy as a tool to encourage modal shift. Whatever the purpose and desired outcome of the study, robust, accurate, and clear data is fundamental to understanding the baseline situation.

We have developed a unique method of capturing parking activity which has a host of benefits over the traditional conduct of paper records. All information is captured on a mapping base, with vehicles plotted exactly where they are on the network for each survey ‘beat’. On site this ensures survey staff can be far more accurate than with any other method for locating of vehicles, and as the return beats are semi-automated can normally cover a bigger area than with corresponding paper based methods.

Post-survey, the information is then interrogated through a series of bespoke programmes to enable excel based tabular and graph results, and image based outputs to provide (for example) average occupancy, turnover, and duration of stay. We have found that for non-technical decision makers, in retail and leisure developments, hospital and educational establishments etc, these images provide a much clearer and easier to interpret impression of parking activity. This adds value at the data collection and presentation stage and saving planners’ time and enabling them to more easily connect with their audience.