Macroscopic Modeling of On-Street and Garage Parking: Impact on Traffic Performance

The short-term interactions between on-street and garage parking policies and the associated parking pricing can be highly influential to the searching-for-parking traffic and the overall traffic performance in the network. In this paper, we develop a macroscopic on-street and garage parking decision model and integrate it into a traffic system with an on-street and garage parking search model over time. We formulate an on-street and garage parking-state-based matrix that describes the system dynamics of urban traffic based on different parking-related states and the number of vehicles that transition through each state in a time slice. This macroscopic modeling approach is based on aggregated data at the network level over time. This leads to data collection savings and a reduction in computational costs compared to most of the existing parking/traffic models. This easy to implement methodology can be solved with a simple numerical solver. All parking searchers face the decision to drive to a parking garage or to search for an on-street parking space in the network. This decision is affected by several parameters including the on-street and garage parking fees. Our model provides a preliminary idea for city councils regarding the short-term impacts of on-street and garage parking policies (e.g., converting on-street parking to garage parking spaces, availability of garage usage information to all drivers) and parking pricing policies on: searching-for-parking traffic (cruising), the congestion in the network (traffic performance), the total driven distance (environmental impact), as well as the revenue created for the city by the hourly on-street and garage parking fee rates. This model can be used to analyze how on-street and garage parking policies can affect traffic performance; and how traffic performance can affect the decision to use on-street or garage parking. The proposed methodology is illustrated with a case study of an area within the city of Zurich, Switzerland.