Spatial parking planning design with mixed conventional and autonomous vehicles

TL;DR

This paper examines how autonomous vehicles' ability to cruise for parking impacts urban parking planning, revealing biases in equilibrium solutions and proposing optimized, differentiated pricing strategies to improve parking efficiency.

Contribution

It is the first study to analyze spatial parking equilibrium considering mixed AV and HV parking behaviors with cruising effects, and proposes a bi-level parking planning model.

Findings

Ignoring cruising effects biases parking location choices.

Optimal AV parking span should be at least as large as equilibrium span.

Differentiated pricing can optimize parking distribution.

Abstract

Travellers in autonomous vehicles (AVs) need not to walk to the destination any more after parking like those in conventional human-driven vehicles (HVs). Instead, they can drop off directly at the destination and AVs can cruise for parking autonomously. It is a revolutionary change that such parking autonomy of AVs may increase the potential parking span substantially and affect the spatial parking equilibrium. Given this, from urban planners' perspective, it is of great necessity to reconsider the planning of parking supply along the city. To this end, this paper is the first to examine the spatial parking equilibrium considering the mix of AVs and HVs with parking cruising effect. It is found that the equilibrium solution of travellers' parking location choices can be biased due to the ignorance of cruising effects. On top of that, the optimal parking span of AVs at given parking supply should be no less than that at equilibrium. Besides, the optimal parking planning to minimize the total parking cost is also explored in a bi-level parking planning design problem (PPDP). While the optimal differentiated pricing allows the system to achieve optimal parking distribution, this study suggests that it is beneficial to encourage AVs to cruise further to park by reserving less than enough parking areas for AVs.