Parking in cites: How essential is parking for healthy central shopping areas?

A reason of concern with restrictive parking policies is that the cities will become less attractive as a destination of various trips so that some activities will relocate to other places. This holds true for example for shopping. When central shopping areas are difficult to visit, customer expenditures may go down and shops may relocate to places at the fringe of the large cities or even further away. In this paper we will discuss these issues from a mainly economic perspective. We start with an economic analysis of the market of parking services and possibilities of government intervention (section 2). In section 3 the theme of parking and shopping will be discussed. This will be followed by some empirical data on shopping related traffic in section 4. In section 5 we present empirical results of a cross-section study on the impact of parking on central shopping areas. In section 6 a survey is given of more detailed studies on the effects of parking. Section 7 concludes.