Parking Management In Curitiba, Brazil
Creators: name: Christopher, Ziemann
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2006
Subjects: Bus rapid transit

description: Throughout the world, cities in developing countries are struggling to cope with astronomical population growth that threatens to eclipse infrastructure capacities and cripple economic sustainability. These trends, however, are not confined to poorer countries, but are also being felt in Europe, Japan, and the United States. (Indeed, growth in our own Triangle Region has triggered the same troubles.) Among the most severe problems resulting from this growth are congestion, smog and air pollution, and access to employment for the poor. As regions become beleaguered by these conditions, public agencies have responded by searching for strategies to improve the efficiency of their transportation systems. Some cities have created alternative transit options such as Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), in which buses are given a right-of-way similar to that of tramways and subways. This approach has alleviated problems of congestion with varying degrees of success. The city that most communities look to as the model BRT system is Curitiba, Brazil. Curitiba has prevented many of the aforementioned problems by establishing one of the first and most successful BRT systems in the world (70% of commuters use this BRT daily [Cervero, 1998]). Indeed, the Curitiba system is often regarded as the premier model that other cities use to plan their own BRT networks. With the second-highest automobile ownership rate in Brazil (one car for every 2.06 inhabitants in 2004 [IPPUC, 2004]), one must ask why their transit system is so popular. While the current literature on Curitiba analyzes the role that land use policies, travel costs, and speed of the system have played, the city's parking has received little attention. The goal of my research is to analyze Curitiba's parking management system against the current literature and to assess whether it is also worthy of being used as a model. The goal of this paper is to extend the knowledge of Curitiba's transportation and land use policies to parking. While other land use policies work to support the BRT system and prioritize public transportation, Curitiba's parking policies should be no different. It will examine the literature available on parking, which describes the various costs and problems with providing parking and minimum parking requirements, and concludes that large supplies and low prices of parking encourage single-occupant driving and discourage public transit use. Through case studies, it examines parking supply and price in areas surrounding five stations along the BRT network (one central, two terminals, and two mid-line stations). This data, in addition to interviews and personal experience, is then analyzed within a framework of factors that influence parking: socio-demographic, urban form, demand, policies and politics. These comparisons will show that high supply (even in the CBD), low prices, and minimum parking requirements contradict the literature and promote automobile driving. This will prove my hypothesis null, that Curitiba's parking management system does not support its BRT.