Modeling and optimization of multimodal urban network with limitedparking and dynamic pricing

Cruising-for-parking is a critical mobility issue in urban cities. The cost and accessibility of parking significantly influence people’s travel behavior (such as mode choice) and facility choice (on-street or garage parking). Furthermore, parking affects traffic performance for all users of a city. Car-users may have to cruise for on-street parking space before reaching destinations and cause delays eventually to everyone, even users with destinations outside limited parking areas. It is therefore crucial to understand the impact of parking on mobility and identify traffic management policies to avoid the negative externalities. Most existing studies of parking either fall short in reproducing the dynamic spatiotemporal features of traffic congestion in general and the cruising-for-parking phenomenon, or require data that are expensive and difficult to collect. In this paper, the authors propose an aggregated dynamic model for multimodal mobility with the consideration of parking, and utilize the model to evaluate management policies, such as parking pricing. The proposed approach is based on the recent development of the low-scattered Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD), which demonstrated decent representation of the complex dynamics of transport system at network-level for single-mode and bi-modal (car and bus) urban networks. The MFD-based bi-modal modeling framework is extended with a parking module where cruising delay and change of behavior (e.g. mode choice and parking facility choice) caused by parking are taken into account. Pricing strategies of parking are then developed to reduce congestion and travel cost. Result of a case study shows that traffic performance under various types of parking policies can be investigated and close-to-optimum pricing schemes can be obtained. Furthermore, parking market competition can be simulated and studied with the proposed modeling approach.