Parking in North America
Parking in some cities could be very hard. Whether you're trying to find a parking spot near your building where you work, or near the restaurant you are about to eat in. Parking could always be a challenge.In geotab.com has collected data over the previous 6 months with Parking Statistics in North America. Let us find out what is the reason behind why parking in some are hard.
This dataset is publicly available in Kaggle(https://www.kaggle.com/terenceshin/searching-for-parking-statistics-in-north-america).
Here’s a breakdown of the data-set for the top 30 cities that has the most number of records.
After getting these cities that records most number of data, I get the average time to find a parking in each city.
Now that we got to see which cities has the highest average of mins to find for parking. We will now see the reason behind this. In the dataset given from Kaggle. It also gave us the percentage of types of vehiccles that is looking for parking. These types are: Cars, Multi Purpose Vehicles, Light Duty Trucks, Medium Duty Trucks, Heavy Duty Trucks and other unspecified vehicles.
Let’s see the correlation of the average percentage of each type of vehicles to the Average time to find parking.
We could see that there is only one correlation that is significant in this heatmap. Most of the cities that has higher average of looking for a parking consists of small cars(0.59). This means that most vehicles that are parking into the city are small cars. While the next is heavy duty trucks with 0.30 correlation.
Looking at these data. Of course there is a lot more reason why is it more difficult to find parking in certain cities(like New York and Washington) to to other less busy cities. Let’s see if what would be the correlation of each city’s population and GDP to the average time to parking.
I have searched for each of these city’s population and GDP and consolidated them in one CSV. Now these figures may not be 100% accurate but it’s a good estimate that came from reliable sources.
I have plotted the Average time to park and the city’s population and this is what we got.
Population of the city and Average time to park has 0.65 correlation. This could be a strong positive coefficient to conclude that; the harder it is to look for a parking spot in the city, the higher the population is.
While on the other hand, we could also see the relation of the time to park and the city’s GDP(Gross Domestic Product). See the plot below.
Similarly with the relationship with the city’s popluation. We could see that there is a positive correlation with the city’s GDP and Average time to park. We could also conclude that; the harder it is to look for a parking spot in the city, the higher the city’s GDP is. In other words, the city may be richer than other less busy city.
This is all that I have concluded in this dataset. I know there are a lot more we could relate this data to, like the average income per household, city’s traffic flow and many more. But here is the complete heatmap of the dataset I used for this article.
There are a lot more remaining factors in why parking is hard everywhere. These could be some road accidents, weather conditions or any other traffic reasons.
