Parking lot evaluation from the perspective of natural elements, physical senses, and psychological perceptions

ABSTRACT

With the increase of civil vehicles, the parking lot has become one of the necessary infrastructures in urban construction in China. Furthermore, the dramatic changes of people’s cognitive ability and needs require innovative methods of parking lot analysis. Landsenses ecology provides new ideas for parking lot evaluation. Through the visual interpretation of images in Google Earth, we extracted the information of the ground parking lots on Xiamen Island. From the perspective of natural elements, physical senses, and psychological perceptions, we selected the infiltration performance, the human comfort, and the landscape aesthetics as evaluation criteria to analyse the constitutive characteristics of the ground parking lots. We constructed comprehensive evaluation index from the three criteria, and evaluated the parking suitability of the ground parking lots. There were ecological problems with the ground parking lots, and more than 82% of the ground parking lots cannot meet people’s demands for better urban environment. This study suggests that landsenses ecology has potentials of broader applications for parking lot evaluation.

KEYWORDS:

• Parking lot
• landsenses ecology
• Normalized Difference Impervious Surface Index
• comfort index of human body
• vegetation coverage
• Xiamen Island

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [41571148].