PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF OFF-STREET PARKING IN ADDIS ABABA CITY (A CASE STUDY IN SELECTED CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICTS)

Abstract

Car-parking sector has always been of great importance in terms of urban mobility, since it is a fundamental element in achieving a high level of accessibility in the city centers. Central Business Districts (CBD) are areas of dense traffic which result in parking problems. Addis Ababa, the administrative and financial capital of Ethiopia, is experiencing continued growth and change. But due to the fact that more than 60% of the vehicles in the country are operated in this city, parking problem is crucial. Parking plays an important role in mobility, access and the economic development of Addis Ababa. The space that parking requires can be problematic in any city, but it poses particular problem in Central Business Districts (CBD). Due to the absence of clearly designated areas of parking in Ethiopia, shortage of parking facilities has been a long standing problem in the country. Especially cities with greater economic activities, greatly faced to traffic congestion and delay problems. The general objective of this research is to evaluate the efficiency of off-street car parking in the Central Business District area of Addis Ababa City. Depending upon their greater demand requirement for a parking facilities, three central business districts of the capital (i.e. ‘Megenagna’, ‘Bole’ and ‘Merkato’) were chosen for detailed analysis. From the stated locations; 11, 13 and 11 off-street parking sites were selected for further analysis respectively. For data collection in and out data collection technique were used. Data was collected from May to September 2019 during the interval of time 8 am-6 pm. From the accumulation graph, peak hour for the demand was selected. The performance analysis result shows that off-street parking’s in the central business district of the city is over their capacity. Demand study was also made to ‘Megenagna’ site by using land use analysis method. From the demand analysis 2,454 additional parking spaces were required to afford the existing demand. In addition to this, structured interview was made to the users of the parking facilities to strengthen the analysis. The research conclude that the main problem of parking in the areas is lack of enough off-street parking space supplies, lack of parking policy and management system, absence of parking signs and marks which results in confusion for finding available parking spaces and lack of knowledge of users for parking usage and shared parking strategies