Evaluation and Development of a University Visitor Parking Management Framework

Abstract

The main campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) has a current parking inventory of approximately 14,310 parking spaces in 88 surface lots. Of the available parking spaces 92% are designated for the use of Virginia Tech students, faculty and staff members. The share of visitor usage of these parking spaces is approximately 2%. The objective of this thesis is to evaluate the current visitor parking system and develop techniques to enhance the parking facility operations. The current visitor parking demand is determined by conducting a field evaluation of the visitor parking in five parking lots. Personal and follow-up interviews were conducted with university visitors to determine their satisfaction levels with the existing parking facilities. While the survey results demonstrated that 52% of visitors rated the parking services to be good or very good, the study also showed that approximately 28% of the visitors did not know the location of the most convenient parking lot to access their destination and almost 6% were not satisfied with the parking services offered by Virginia Tech. Apart from this, about 32% of the visitors had to visit at least 2 parking lots before finding a parking space. These figures clearly demonstrate a need for a better management of the parking lots to serve the visitors in an efficient way. In an attempt to enhance the visitor parking system a web-based interactive framework is proposed. This framework identifies the best possible parking lot(s) for a selected destination considering various factors like - distance of the parking lot to the destination and typical occupancy of the parking lot at specific times of the day and other relevant factors. The web-based interactive system is designed to provide the visitor with two or more choices for the parking in order to arrive at their desired destination.