Parking management is a very powerful tool to influence the demand for car use and to allocate public space in terms of people, active modes and public transport. In many cities in Europe and beyond, however, there has traditionally been a tendency to deal with parking problems in a reactive manner. When faced with a lack of parking spaces, for instance, cities simply responded by increasing the total supply of parking spaces. Such reactive policies have, amongst others, led to the preponderance of private cars that characterizes modern-day cities as well as to associated negative impacts on urban mobility and quality of life. Moreover, cities’ reactive parking policies also underline the observation that parking management currently is one of the most underdeveloped aspects of Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning (or SUMP).
Park4SUMP, an EU-funded Horizon 2020 project, aimed to change this. Park4SUMP intended to be a game-changer for urban mobility by strategically integrating parking management into SUMP. Such a strategic approach to parking management can help cities in gaining public and political acceptance, freeing up valuable public space, supporting local businesses, reducing parking search traffic, increasing road safety, supporting urban planning, making themselves more attractive to inhabitants and visitors alike and, finally, encouraging sustainable modal shifts. In this regard, Park4SUMP actively sought to contribute to European Green Deal ambitions and the EU Commission’s new Urban Mobility Framework.
Sixteen cities joined the project to demonstrate and transfer the various benefits of strategically and smartly managed parking. Park4SUMP helped these cities to achieve a broad roll-out of parking management best practices. It also stimulated further innovation in parking management, raised awareness and acceptance of new parking policies at different government levels, built capacity, and improved increased urban quality of life by alleviating parking pressure. Through Park4SUMP, all sixteen cities sought to dramatically improve their parking policies and establish parking management as a pinnacle of their respective SUMPs.
