Economics of Parking: Short, Medium, and Long-Term Planning

Worldwide surveys have shown that cruising for parking substantially increases the travel time of individuals and leads to higher traffic congestion as well. Motivated by the need to mitigate adverse effects of parking, this thesis investigates the impact of emerging short, medium, and long-term parking policies. Hourly parking pricing is a short-term policy whereby vehicles pay based on their dwell time. We show that hourly parking pricing can actually increase congestion if imposed imprudently, but if devised optimally, it can lead to better traffic management. Parking enforcement is a medium-term policy comprised of a citation fine and a level-of- enforcement (e.g., number of inspection cameras in streets). We quantify the effect of enforcement policies and we investigate the impact of enforcement technology (i.e., on-foot inspection or camera-based inspection) on illegal parking behaviour. For long-term planning, we model the impact of autonomous vehicles (AV) on parking. With the anticipated growth in AVs, passengers no longer need to park near their final destination. Instead, passengers are dropped off by AVs at their final destination and the AVs travel to the nearest and most affordable available parking lot. We investigate the parking patterns of AVs and show that they substantially decrease parking search time.Ph.D