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Donostia-San Sebastian introduced a new zoning and pricing strategy to better regulate parking in the city and reduce the number of cars accessing the city centre. Special incentives were developed for high occupancy vehicles to promote car pooling.
At the start of the CIVTAS project a single tariff for on-street and underground parking was in place in a large part of the city centre of Donostia-San Sebastian. The new parking strategy aimed to decrease the number of cars accessing certain destinations through differentiated tariffs according to a new zoning structure.
The main objectives of the measure were to:
For the business districts a “soft” regulation of parking provisions was foreseen to serve short and mid-stay demand, mainly related to loading /unloading services and visitor parking. These users faced difficulties in finding parking places in the middle of the day when all spaces were already occupied.
Four Pricing Zones were defined, following a radial criterion, fixing more deterrent, higher to lower rates depending on parking demand in each zone.
The system also established Maximum Lengths of Stay based on the type and level of demand that needs to be met in each zone, namely:
These conditions were combined with 3 tariff bands defined according to the type of user as follows:
As part of the measure, the parking regulation bylaw was modified to reflect the changes in the parking policy. The measure also included the implementation of preferential and reserved areas for high occupancy vehicles (HOV) as a mean to promote car-pooling, considered as powerful tool to reduce congestion. An information campaign explained the changes in the parking policy to the citizens of the respective neighbourhoods.
After the research phase, a series of workshops in the business areas were planned to discuss the foreseen parking regulation in the business districts. During the first workshops several companies expressed their opposition to this measure that would affect their employees. Due to growing controversy in social and political spheres, the commissioning of this part of the measure was first postponed and finally cancelled.
Parking management measures are very sensitive and very often raise strong position from citizens. This was the case in Donostia-San Sebastian, where the extension of the paid parking area was assessed as negative by a majority of the population (59% before the implementation and 75% after it started operating). This was a surprising result, taking into account that with the regulation of parking residents have more parking spaces available to park. However, visitors from other districts may see their parking options limited.
The public opinion seemed also to be independent from the overall mobility improvements driven by the integrated package of CIVITAS measures. The number of cars entering to the CIVITAS corridor were reduced with more than 7.500 cars per day as compared to the before situation. Following the reduction in traffic levels, a decrease in parking demand was experienced, decreasing by a 20% if the situation after the implementation of the measure is compared to the situation before the new parking management scheme started operating.