Home parking convenience, household car usage, and implications to residential parking policies

•Home parking convenience affects household car usage.•Improved home parking certainty encourages car mode share, trip frequency, and VMT.•The ease of moving cars in and out of a parking location also affects car usage.•Residential parking regulations have a strong impact on travel outcomes.

This paper investigates the effect of home parking convenience on households' car usage, and the implications to residential parking policies. A random sample of 840 households is selected from a travel survey in the New York City region, and their home parking types are identified through Google Street View. It found that with the same car ownership level, households without off-street parking used cars much less, and relied more on alternative modes than those with off-street parking. For households with access to both garage and street parking, those who use the handy street parking tend to make more car tours than those who do not. In general, convenient home parking encourages households' car usage. Policy implications to the minimum off-street parking requirement, residents parking permit, street cleaning, and new urbanism neighborhood design are discussed.