Street-Segment Variation and Urban Impacts of Illegal Parking in a Latin American Intermediate City: Street-Level Evidence from Loja, Ecuador

Illegal parking is a persistent challenge in central areas of intermediate cities, where growing demand for curb access competes with limited road space, pedestrian circulation, and public transport operations. While previous research on parking management and curbside regulation has documented links between parking behavior, congestion, and street performance, empirical evidence based on direct street-segment observations remains limited in Latin American intermediate-city contexts. This study examines the distribution across observed street segments, user profile, and urban impacts of parking events across six commercial street segments in central Loja, Ecuador. A total of 1425 parking events were recorded between 11 and 28 May 2026 and classified by maneuver type, vehicle type, apparent use, parking reason, companions, operational conditions, and impacts on congestion, pedestrian circulation, and public transport. Descriptive statistics, exact confidence intervals, chi-square tests with Cramér’s V, false discovery rate correction, standardized residuals, and adjusted logistic regression models were applied. Results show that 64.4% of observed events were infractions, mainly prohibited-zone parking (38.9%) and double parking (25.5%). Infraction type varied strongly by street segment (Cramér’s V = 0.651). Adjusted congestion probabilities were substantially higher for double parking (45.0%) and prohibited-zone parking (41.3%) than for non-infraction events (10.2%). The findings indicate substantial heterogeneity in illegal-parking prevalence and composition among the six observed street segments, together with significant associations between parking infractions and urban street performance. These results identify segment-specific differences within the study area but should not be interpreted as evidence of spatial predictability beyond the observed locations and period.