Park-and-ride, boon or boondoggle?

Matt L has just dissected AT’s recent announcement regarding the expansion of the Albany Park and Ride.

Park and ride is a vexed transport planning issue: It’s very popular with middle-class commuters and as a result tends to receive a lot of public/political support.  On the other hand, P&R’s merits are often not well understood.  Is P&R really the boon it is made out to be?

Let’s consider the arguments usually put forward in discussions on P&R; turning first to the downsides:

1. P&R requires considerable tracts of land.  For this reason it tends to be very, very expensive to provide within the urban area, unless opportunistic (read CHEAP) land parcels are identified (more on this later).  Given the cost of land and the general constraints on PT funding in Auckland, it is quite reasonable to ask whether P&R in urban locations represent value for money – compared to other possible PT improvements.
2. The second issue is a logical extension of the first: Because P&R requires so much land it squeezes out opportunities for intensive land use development, often in the very locations that have good PT access.  This second issue is very important, because it means that P&R may actually generate relatively few *additional* trips per sqm, above and beyond what would be generated by the intensive land uses that would exist in the absence of the P&R.
3. The third major issue with P&R is that it competes with other modes to provide access to PT stations.  Surveys of the Northern Busway have shown that approximately 50% of users previously used local buses.  The message is that providing free P&R can encourage people to drive down the road and park, when they previously waited for a local bus (which is typically going to run anyway, i.e. relatively low marginal economic costs).
4. The final major issue with P&R is that it concentrates vehicles on what are often strategic locations in the road network. In the case of Albany, the provision of 1,100 car-parks within the town centre itself represents about one full lane of traffic.  By concentrating vehicle volumes at these locations, large amounts of P&R may soak up capacity in the surrounding road network and cause localised congestion.

Just to re-cap the points made above: 1) P&R can be expensive to provide (because of the land that it occupies); 2) may generate little additional patronage (above and beyond what we would get anyway); 3) tends to compete with other modes of access to PT stations (which are often more cost-effective); and 4) can cause localised congestion.

Given these issues you might reasonably ask under what circumstances would you ever want to develop P&R?  The answer is that P&R can be useful where:

1. Alternative means of PT access (primarily local bus services) are ineffective.  In these situations P&R can help to focus PT demands to a level that supports a modicum of PT service.  This tends to be outside the main urban area, where land is cheaper to provide (especially where you can identify opportunistic land parcels, such as sites beneath high-voltage power lines or in flood prone areas, as is done for some P&R sites in Vancouver).
2. It is priced appropriately.  Charging people to use P&R generates revenue from users and mitigates two of the issues noted above.  Namely, the cost (or subsidy) of providing P&R goes down, while also reducing the degree to which  P&R competes with other (substitutable) modes of access.  Pricing P&R really just levels the playing field with other possible ways of getting to the PT station.  It can also reduce the congestion caused by P&R.
3. The PT station has been provided in advance of more intensive land use development.  Here P&R simply becomes an interim land use, until such time as development is ready to occur.  At this point the land on which the P&R sits can be sold and the costs recovered.  This practise of “landbanking” is not a bad strategy, especially where the interim P&R allows PT services to build to the point where they support relatively intensive development.

Given these pros and cons, as well as the general public/political pressure, it is perhaps not unsurprising that PT agencies struggle to find an appropriate role for P&R. In my experience most cities have relatively ad-hoc approaches to the development P&R.

So where to from here?  Well, I thought I’d round out this post with a few takeaway P&R messages that I’ve collected during my years working as a transport consultant working in New Zealand and Australia:

1. The party rarely lasts – P&R is usually an interim activity.  P&R should be viewed less as a permanent feature of the PT network and more as an interim activity that is redeveloped at some point in the future.  Rose-tinted press-releases (such as that released for Albany) create the illusion of a never-ending feast of free P&R and build a public rod to beat the backs of future decision-makers (as an aside, there is a general need for transport agencies to better manage public/political expectations).
2. Ain’t no party like a policy party – the development of P&R should be governed by policy.  Experiences in cities overseas has highlighted the issues that may arise with ad-hoc P&R development.   In San Francisco, the (private) operators of BART had a pig of a time trying to redevelop and/or charge for P&R decades after the development of the system, even though the land on which the P&R sat was wholly privately owned.
3. No party is that cool – P&R is just another form of PT investment.  Ultimately, P&R is just another way of getting people onto the PT system.  As such, any proposed investment should be compared against other possible uses of that money.

Following these three P&R ‘party rules’ can help ensure that investments in P&R are a boon, not a boondoggle.

*** Disclosure of interest: Stuart Donovan is manager of MRCagney’s Auckland Office, which provides transport and planning consulting services to public and private sector clients throughout the Asia-Pacific region.  The views expressed in this article are his alone; they do not necessarily represent the views of MRCagney, its employees, and/or its clients. ***

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