The Downtown Parking Study Poster (Troup Downtown Master Plan) covers parking counts on Weekdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Parking is shown at 30-minute increments throughout the day for parking lots and on-street spaces. Parking shortages are discussed in the Parking Occupancy maps, with special attention paid to spaces for Downtown retail on Weekdays, but Saturday shortages were observed on occasion. Sunday parking shortages were much less common except near churches. Downtown's core and the streets around Troup Elementary School have the highest occupancy rates overall. Several CBD lots far exceed 100% occupancy because of double parking and vehicles left outside of actual spaces.
Some charts also show parking by land use type, explaining how much parking stores, offices, and other businesses are using in Downtown. An "on/off" chart shows that several Downtown types, like restaurants and apartments/lofts, have offset peaks. That relationship makes parking sharing ideal, returning more bang for the buck on lot construction. Parking counts for each land use category are compared for different days of the week too.
The Peak Time of Day maps show when in the day that each Downtown parking lot is at its busiest. Parking differences by day is considered, with a map identifying which day sees the most cars for every lot. Some surprises on that map include higher Saturday peaks than on Weekdays in the Brookshire's Grocery lot. Also, an entire district is nearly deserted by parked cars on Saturdays (near the elementary school). Weekdays have the most sustained parking activity, called "critical mass." Downtown parking on Weekdays is active to that level for 11 hours, from 7:30 AM to 6:30 PM.
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Day of the week comparisons allow economic development planning that takes advantage of spare parking and existing customer activity. Weekdays have higher parking totals than weekends in most cases, but not in the late evenings. Both Saturdays and Sundays present opportunities for expanded or new businesses based on this study of Downtown parking.
Turnover time (how long a space is occupied before a car leaves) is discussed with a map and chart. It is critical that spaces around stores and retail have access to high turnover parking. Knowing how long spaces remain in use helps calculate Downtown's effective supply. Effective supply is the total number of vehicles that can be parked in a district over a set amount of time, such as the workday. Downtown Troup has 1,014 spaces built. Its effective supply is much larger though, able to accommodate 3,112 customers and employees over 10 hours.
The percentage of parked cars and trucks belonging to employees or downtown residents is discussed too. If shortages become common, moving these vehicles to off-street lots will open up spaces for shoppers and customers.
The parking survey ran from October 2013 to May 2014. Counts were run every 30 minutes. A total of 466 courting trips were made through Downtown Troup for statistical reliability.
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