Parking behaviour
Sjoerd Stienstra from Grontmij and Ian Betts (a parking consultant from the UK) gave a joint presentation showing that many factors determine the price someone is prepared to pay for parking. A town with good shops and high parking rates will still have full car parks. No matter how much motorists complain about the rates, they still park there even if less expensive alternatives are available in the vicinity. Parking authorities that try and distribute cars more equally across floors note that it has little effect if the rates on the upper floors are lower. 

There is no such thing as free parking, according to Stienstra. It simply has to be determined who will bear the costs: the government, the owners of buildings, the shop owners or their customers. He argues for a well-funded policy on who should bear the costs. In addition, it is clear that the amount visitors are willing to pay is largely dependent on the added value the location can offer. In this regard, factors like the purpose of the shopping trip and the position of the town in the shop hierarchy play a role.

An international issue
The symposium brought together parking professionals from North America, Australia, Asia, Africa and Europe. Although parking is common to all countries, there are large differences. In Tel Aviv, for example, on-street parking is virtually always free of charge while in Japan a mere 5% of parking spaces are found on-street and 95% of parking capacity is provided in private car parks. An important reason for this is that in Japan people are only allowed to buy a car when they can prove that they have access to a parking space. In Australia, parking is for the most part handled by the national government. Despite differences such as these, dealing with the issue of parking is a global phenomenon. 

Important speakers at the conference included:

• Tim Haahs, Director of Timothy Haahs & Associates from the United States, argued for dramatic developments in urban planning.

• George Brown of the Department of Planning and Infrastructure of Western Australia gave examples of a sustainable approach to traffic and parking in Perth.

• Shoji Matsumoto of the Nagaoka University of Technology showed that Japan is only on the brink of the integration of urban development parking.

• Donald Shoup, Professor of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles compared parking on the campus of a university to parking in a small town.

• Itzhak Benenson of the University of Tel Aviv and  Karel Martens of the Radboud University explained the parking system in Tel Aviv. They examined the link between occupancy rates and the amount of search traffic. Search traffic occurs when the occupancy rate is above 85%. However, search time increases significantly when the occupancy rate rises above 95%.

• Bern Grush, of Skymeter Corp in Toronto introduced the mega parking meter that works with a satellite-based global positioning system. 

Other topics treated were the underpinning of parking rates, integrated parking guidance systems and automated parking systems.