Capacity impacts and optimal geometry of automated cars' surface parking facilities

The impact of Automated Vehicles (AVs) on urban geography has been widely speculated, though there is little quantitative evidence in the literature to establish the magnitude of such effects. To quantify the impact of the greater precision of automated driving on the spatial efficiency of off-street parking facilities, we develop a mixed integer nonlinear model (solved via a branch-and-cut approach) and present comparisons against industry-standard requirements for human-driving operation. We demonstrate that gains on the order of 40–50% in spatial efficiency (parking spaces per unit area) are in principle achievable while ensuring that each parked vehicle is independently accessible. We further show that the large majority of these efficiency gains can be obtained under current automotive engineering practice in which only the front two wheels pivot. There is a need for standardized methods that take the parking supply of a city as an input and calculate both the aggregate (citywide) efficiency impacts of automated driving and the spatial distribution of the effects. This study is intended as an initial step towards this objective