Static traffic, especially represented by parking lots, is an important part of the whole transportation system. However, with the continuous growth of car ownership，China is facing the problems of shortage of parking spaces and high vacancy rate of parking spaces caused by tidal effect. The government is encouraging people to participate in the construction of parking lots while smart parking is bringing positive change to the parking lot operator, but there have not been any in-depth studies that discuss the operation of parking spaces state in Chinese cities from a business and economic perspective. To fill above-mentioned research gap, this study classifies parking operations into three business models: owned, lease, and manage，the value of which is completely different from a capital perspective. Japan has similar conditions with China in parking lot operation, hence this study reviews the development history of Japan's largest parking lot operator, Park24, which benefited from unattended parking facilities and Japan’s relatively sound parking regulation policies. Three conclusions are drawn: with the increase of the number of managed parking spaces (1) the average revenue of a single parking space will drop to a certain fixed value; (2) refinancing tools such as ABS/REITs play an important role in the development process; (3) the operator needs to expand business scope to find new engine of growth. This paper calculates the economic benefit of a typical parking lot in China before and after the intelligent renovation in different business models. The results display that intelligent renovation of ordinary parking lots have positive NPV but has a lower Annualized ROI compared to risk-free rate. However, it must be pointed out that the parking lot operation has strong public service attributes and social benefits. Decisions cannot be simply made based only on economic benefits.

CICTP