Parking, energy consumption and air pollution

This paper examines the impacts of different ways of parking on environmental effects, mainly vehicle emissions and air pollution. Vehicle energy consumption and the urban air quality at street level, related to location and design of parking establishments, need to be assessed and quantified. In addition, the indoor parking environment needs attention. This paper gives a description of a methodological approach when comparing different parking establishments. The paper also briefly describes a Swedish attempt to create methods and models for assessing and quantifying such problem. The models are the macrolevel model BRAHE, for regional traffic exhaust emission, and the micromodel SimPark, a parking search model attempt combined with emission models. Until now, very limited knowledge exists regarding the various aspects of vehicle parking and environmental effects in the technical field as well as in the social and human behaviour aspects. This requires an interdisciplinary approach to this challenging area for research, development and more directly practically implemented surveys and field studies. In order to illustrate the new evaluation methodology, the paper also contains some results from a pilot study in Stockholm. Given certain assumptions, a study of vehicle emissions from parking in an underground garage compared with kerbside parking has given an emission reduction of about 40% in favour of the parking garage. This study has been done using the models mentioned above.