TABLE OF CONTENTS Every trip by a vehicle results in a parking act at the end of the trip. The importance of parking can perhaps be illustrated by the fact that, on average, a car in the UK is parked for about 23 hours a day. The vehicle may be parked on the street or off-street in a car/lorry/cycle park, or in a private garage. How vehicles arrive and depart from these parking places, how long they stay and under what circumstances define vehicular traffic and indeed some pedestrian traffic on the roads and help to determine what measures are required to meet or manage the demand. Therefore, it is very important to obtain an objective and unbiased understanding of this activity by properly constructed and conducted surveys.
To allow us to understand the parking behaviour, there are a multitude of parking survey techniques, which have been developed, each aimed at measuring something slightly different. Each technique is discussed below, in terms of the order of complexity.
Activity will vary from day to day and season to season, and theoretical statisticians would no doubt expect any survey to be repeated for a representative number of days or periods in order to ensure a completely unbiased and representative sample, or to attach levels of uncertainty to the outcomes of surveys if collected on a single day. Unfortunately, traffic engineers seldom have the luxury of either the time or resources necessary to undertake multiple repeat surveys and have...
