Curbing cruising-as-substitution-for-parking in automated mobility

This study considers dynamic parking management in the era of driving automation that users of privately-owned automated vehicles (AVs) come to a downtown area to conduct various activities and choose between three parking options: outside parking, on-street parking, and cruising-as-substitution-for-parking. In the latter, AVs cruise in downtown until summoned by their users after concluding their activities. Given the distribution of users’ activity time in downtown, we propose a system of ordinary differential equations to model AVs’ parking choice and capture the impact of cruising-as-substitution-for-parking on traffic congestion. With the proposed model, we further investigate dynamic time-based tolling and parking provision to optimize the system performance. Results of our numerical experiments demonstrate the validity of our model and the potential of dynamic tolling and parking provision on managing downtown parking of AVs.