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Top1. Introduction
Despite its many advantages, continuous urbanisation has brought a wide range of problems, many of which are associated with rapid growth in car use. According to the Texas A&M Transportation Institute for example, in 2011 people living in US cities endured 5.5 billion hours of traffic delay, resulting in the use of an additional 2.9 billion gallons of fuel costing approximately $121 billion and causing the emission of 56 billion lbs of CO2 (Schrank et al, 2012). These figures are approximately five times higher than corresponding statistics from 1982. Such problems are not limited to the USA; in 2012, a report by Christidis and Rivas estimated the annual cost of traffic congestion in the EU to be around €111 billion (approximately 1% of the EU’s total GDP).
The problems associated with congestion do not just affect other drivers. Users of public transport are subject to the delays caused by traffic jams; and cyclists, pedestrians and residents are all affected by noise and pollution (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2013).
One significant factor that contributes to congestion is limited parking. For example, in an analysis of data gathered from studies of cities around the world between 1927 and 2001, Shoup (2006) found that most of the studies reported that drivers searching for a parking space spent over 6 minutes ‘cruising’. Inexperienced drivers and visitors to a city are likely to take even longer (Teodorović & Lučić, 2006), with drivers surveyed in Frankfurt in 1992 reporting cruising times of over an hour (Axhausen et al, 1994). Such is the negative impact of seeking for free parking spaces that, in some cities, a driver doing so is referred to as a “traffic-parasite” (Giuffrè & Siniscalchi, 2012).
In many city centres, land is at a premium, so increasing the number of available parking spaces is not always an option. Smart Parking opens up possibilities for the better management of existing parking, allowing spaces to be found more quickly and filled more effectively. However, although many technologies can contribute to such schemes, they cannot succeed without the engagement of the drivers who may benefit from them.
This paper explores which factors have an impact on the engagement of drivers with Smart Parking services, and which may affect the use of on-street parking. To do so, it draws on the experiences of users of an innovative Smart Parking initiative that was introduced by the London Borough of Westminster in 2014. The research reported on here seeks to increase understanding of how new technologies associated with a Smart Parking scheme are perceived; and to explore and analyse factors that might influence the use of such a scheme. To do so, it draws on both technology acceptance theories and social influence theories to incorporate influencing factors into a predictive exploratory model.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a review of relevant existing literature on Smart Cities and Smart Parking; Section 3 describes our proposed theoretical explanatory model; this is followed by Section 4 that describes the research methodology, including data collection and analysis. The results of the study are presented in Section 5, including confirmation of the explanatory model and Section 6 discusses these in light of the existing literature. Finally, Section 7 concludes the paper.