Do residential areas require shared parking? A case study of Tianjin, China

Abstract

Shared parking has shown great potential in alleviating the shortage of parking spaces, particularly within residential areas with high parking demand. However, studies on shared parking's effectiveness in meeting nighttime parking demand remain limited. This study investigates whether shared parking facilities, integrating existing resources, can effectively alleviate nighttime parking shortages in residential areas. Using empirical data from Tianjin, China, the spatiotemporal patterns of potential shared parking demand are analyzed. The research results indicate that approximately 70 % of nighttime shortages in residential areas can be addressed through shared parking resources provided by surrounding buildings. Additionally, this study explores the nonlinear relationship between the built environment and shared parking demand, providing a quantitative analysis. Explainable machine learning techniques reveal that the built environment factors have obvious nonlinear effects and threshold effects on demand for shared parking. The important thresholds that significantly affect the demand for shared parking vary across different built environment factors. The identification of these threshold values can be beneficial for providing tailored policy to integrate existing parking facilities into shared parking, aligning with varying resource availability and residential area demands.