The city of Utrecht has implemented three Park+Ride (P+R) areas on the edge of the city, which are designed to allow city visitors to park their car and continue their journey to the city centre by public transport or shared mobility. As part of the city’s Mobility Plan 2040 (established in 2021), the number of on-street car parking spaces is aimed to reduce by 0.5% to 1% per year, freeing up inner city space and promoting sustainable urban mobility. As a counter balance, the municipality is hoping to increase occupancy of the existing P&R facilities by improving accessibility for city visitors.

Within the scope of RAPTOR, Gemeente Utrecht is seeking to better understand the reasons why citizens use or not the P+R system, and are looking for ways to improve the existing offering and for how to scale the solutions to other P+Rs. Together with EIT Urban Mobility’s Citizen Insights team, we developed a targeted citizen engagement strategy to understand how Utrecht can improve, change or optimise its P+R system, in particular Westraven P+R, to increase the number of users.

Using mixed qualitative research methods (interviews, an online survey and observations) both remotely and on-site by two members of EIT Urban Mobility’s Masters network, Jasmijn Brouwer and Duco van der Kroft, the contextual enquiry revolved around two focuses: on the one hand, defining the user group(s) that can most benefit from Utrecht’s P&R system; and on the other, understand the barriers and motivators for using the P&R, both for users and non-users of the system.

The project concluded with an online workshop led by Humankind where all project partners were present, ideating on potential ways to alleviate the biggest challenges users’ currently find with the P&R system, most importantly the complexity of the ticketing process.