Inventorying San Francisco Bay Area Parking Spaces: Technical Report Describing Objectives, Methods, and Results

Abstract:

The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the most progressive transportation regions in the deployment of high-capacity transit and use of policies to encourage active transportation. Yet like many other metro regions, there remains a dearth of knowledge on the abundance and location of parking infrastructure supply. Parking infrastructure remains one of the least catalogued infrastructure but is perhaps the most spatially dominating set of assets. This research estimates the extent and location of parking supply, including on-street and off-street spaces for the nine-county Bay Area. This parking space inventory is the most detailed assessment of parking infrastructure produced for the Bay Area, and represents an important starting point for addressing the impacts of and crafting policy for future transportation goals.

Key findings from the parking census include:

The nine-county Bay Area has 15 million parking spaces, enough parking to wrap around the planet 2.3 times.
Twenty percent of the region's unincorporated land is devoted to driving and storing cars.
There are approximately 2.4 spaces for every car and approximately 1.9 parking spaces for every person in the Bay Area.

This technical report, and accompanying San Francisco Parking Census dataset, was the result of a partnership between MTI and SPUR, a nonprofit public policy organization in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Publications:

Inventorying San Francisco Bay Area Parking Spaces: Technical Report Describing Objectives, Methods, and Results (Full Report)

Additional Resources:

San Francisco Parking Census dataset (zip file)

Authors:

MIKHAIL CHESTER, PHD
Dr. Mikhail Chester is an Associate Professor of Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering and Director of the Metis Center for Infrastructure and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University. Broadly, his work addresses the challenges of positioning infrastructure for increasingly complex future environments, and the technical and governance strategies needed to engage with this complexity. Specific to urban infrastructure, he’s led studies to quantify the extent and implications of metro region parking supply in Los Angeles and Phoenix, including urban heat island effects.

ALYSHA HELMRICH, PHD
Dr. Alysha Helmrich is an urban systems engineer with a BS and MS in Environmental and Ecological Engineering from Purdue University and a PhD in Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering from Arizona State University. Her research interests include urban resilience, infrastructure systems, systems-thinking, and decision-making under uncertainty.

RUI LI
Rui Li is a PhD Candidate in Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University. Her research interests focus on transportation infrastructure climate vulnerability analysis. She has led research efforts to study large-scale transportation network vulnerability to climate hazards including California roadway risk to post-wildfire debris flows and heat mitigation infrastructure and travel behavior change for metro active transport across Phoenix.

Published:

February 2022