Parking policies and their impacts on urban networks

Parking policies and their interactions with the urban traffic and parking systems can have significant impacts on the traffic performance and the congestion in an urban area.These impacts have a long-term component affecting the travel demand and the travelers' preferences, and a short-term component affecting the traffic and parking operations.This dissertation studies multiple parking policies focusing on pricing and occupancy aspects and analyzes their short-term impacts on the parking searchers and the performance of the traffic and parking systems, which, in turn, might impact the efficiency of the parking policies themselves.In other words, we investigate the interdependencies between different parking policies and parking-caused traffic issues.In particular, we evaluate the influences on the searching-for-parking traffic, the congestion in the network, the total driven distance, and the revenue created by parking, park and ride (P+R) fees, and/or congestion tolls for the city.We show the results for the different parking policies in some case studies of a central area within the city of Zurich, Switzerland.Our easy to implement model uses a dynamic macroscopic framework which saves on data collection efforts and reduces the computational costs significantly as all values correspond to aggregations at the network level over time.Our work clusters the parking policies into two types.First, we study static and dynamic parking pricing strategies and second, we investigate parking occupancy related strategies.i.At the beginning of this dissertation, we focus on a macroscopic on-street and garage parking framework which allows us to model the drivers' decision between searching for an on-street parking space or driving to a parking garage instead.Different static on-street and garage parking fee ratios are analyzed with respect to the impacts on the traffic system and the parking search model over time.Our framework shows how traffic performance issues might influence the drivers' decision between on-street and garage parking in the short-term.This decision is faced by multiple user groups with respect to their value of time (VOT).We study the impacts of different parking policies, including the availability of real-time garage usage information, and the conversion of on-street parking to garage parking spaces.The recovered on-street curb can then be used for other activities (e.g., bike lanes) in order to improve the quality of life for the city's residents.Another strategy for cities might be to establish a P+R facility outside the city in order to reduce the searching-for-parking traffic in the central area.We analyze a P+R policy with static fares and compare it to a congestion pricing scenario and/or parking pricing policy in the network.In case the area consists of a high number of public parking spaces, parking pricing could be considered as a viable alternative to congestion pricing in terms of improving the performance of the traffic and parking system (i.e., traffic performance, parking availability, revenue for the city, etc.).Different parking fees or traffic conditions might, however, affect