Effectiveness of traffic signs to prevent fly parking

As bicycle use increases, so does the need for formal parking spaces to safely store them while performing other activities at a destination. In the Netherlands, several municipalities have created indoor and outdoor formal parking spaces, which remain underutilised. Instead, many cyclists choose to ‘fly park’, i.e. informally lock their bicycle to objects on the street. This can cause dangerous situations or inconvenience, for example by blocking sidewalks. The discrepancy between the use of formal and informal parking spaces may be attributed to a lack of information provided to cyclists about the available formal parking options. This study investigated the effectiveness of different traffic sign designs in encouraging the use of formal parking spaces. The designs were developed within this research with the intention of capturing different communication strategies, namely hazardous, neutral educative and negative educative. A stated preference choice experiment was then performed to allow the comparison of the effectiveness of the different designs, and thus communication strategies. The responses were analysed using discrete choice modelling. According to the results, traffic signs alerting users to the fact that controls are performed (hazardous communication) are the most effective in the fly parking prevention, especially for frequent bicycle users.