Level of service for parking facilities

With the number of motor vehicles rapidly increasing, urban parking has become an intolerable problem in major cities in China. Parking facility service evaluations play an important role in urban transportation planning and operation. This paper introduces a level of service (LOS) concept based on a comprehensive parking study in Beijing, China. The LOS methodology developed by an integrated evaluation model reflects the user´s perception of the quality of service. The method combines four important service variables, namely the ratio of peak-hour demand to capacity, average parking space occupying rate, parking cost, and circulation time, into one single index to quantitatively evaluate a parking facility´s performance.