Geert Tasseron

The Potential Impact of Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Sensor-to-Vehicle Communication in Urban Parking

Studies have shown that up to thirty percent of all traffic in crowded urban areas can be cruising for parking. Information provision to drivers can potentially decrease cruising time for individual drivers and subsequently improve the performance of the overall system. While most cities provide drivers with information on the occupancy rates of off-street parking facilities, information on single on-street parking places was non-existing until recently. Recent technological advances have made it possible to provide such information.

Urban parking space reservation through bottom-up information provision: An agent-based analysis

Abstract The aim of this paper is to study the impacts of a reservation system for on-street parking. Such a system provides drivers looking for on-street parking with information on available parking spaces, thereby possibly reducing the need to cruise for parking and the accompanying negative externalities. The performance of the proposed system is studied using a highly detailed spatial agent-based simulation. The results of the simulations show that users of a reservation system benefit in terms of reduced search time and reduced walking distance under virtually all simulated circumstances. However, societal benefits are not as clear-cut. The benefit in search time for the users of the system comes at a cost to the regular drivers, which see a nearly identical increase in search time. In contrast, the positive impact on walking distance hardly influences walking distance for regular drivers. Hence, we conclude that the introduction of a reservation system for on-street parking results in a more efficient distribution of available parking spaces among drivers searching for parking.

The Impact of Bottom-Up Parking Information Provision in a Real-Life Context: The Case of Antwerp

A number of studies have analyzed the possible impacts of bottom-up parking information or parking reservation systems on parking dynamics in abstract simulation environments. In this paper, we take these efforts one step further by investigating the impacts of these systems in a real-life context: the center of the city of Antwerp, Belgium. In our simulation, we assume that all on-street and off-street parking places are equipped with technology able to transmit their occupancy status to so-called smart cars, which can receive information and reserve a parking place. We employ PARKAGENT, an agent-based simulation model, to simulate the behavior of smart and regular cars. We obtain detailed data on parking demand from FEATHERS, an activity-based transport model. The simulation results show that parking information and reservation hardly impact search time but do reduce walking distance for smart cars, leading to a reduction in total parking time, that is, the sum of search time and walking time. Reductions in search time occur only in zones with high occupancy rates, while a drop in walking distance is especially observed in low occupancy areas. Societal benefits of parking information and reservation are limited, because of the low impact on search time and the possible negative health effects of reduced walking distance.