Abstract:
Minimum parking regulations (MPR) are a modern planning disaster. MPRs have reduced the economic, social and environmental vitality of urban areas by distorting accessibility and, forcing a degraded, inefficient urban form. However, assessing the impacts of MPR on accessibility urban development is a complex process. Traditional urban land use models are computationally draining and mathematically difficult, often failing to effectively capture urban dynamics. They fundamentally fail to represent accessibility in a meaningful way, often reducing transportation systems down to solely consisting of mobility and neglecting proximity or the spatial footprint of transport infrastructure. Newer dynamic models of urban development, particularly models based upon Cellular Automata (CA), promise to provide a greater understanding of the ‘city’. However, to date none address accessibility in a complex, bottom-up manner. In this study, a CA model of urban development is created in which accessibility is built from the ‘bottom-up’ using a process called weighted diffusion. The accessibility surface created through this process then drives the location of urban development. The implementation of this weighted diffusion means that the effects of transportation systems can now be incorporated into spatial diffusion models of accessibility and urban development. The results of this study indicate that MPRs could be a major driver in the urban form witnessed in modern cities, and that a greater understanding of accessibility is required by urban planners and policy makers. In order to build compact, dense cities resilient to the twin challenges of peak oil and climate change this study recommends the immediate removal of MPRs from planning agencies regulatory framework. In addition, this study also calls for further analysis of alternative land use regulations that are working against the economic and environmental sustainability of urban areas.
