Local Benefits Exceed Costs For Widespread Charging Infrastructure For On-Street Urban Parking

BackgroundLack of charging infrastructure is a critical barrier to the dissemination of electric cars and many cities have started installing charging stations in public parking spaces.We do a cost-benefit analyses of installing charging stations in public parking spaces, with different assumptions for uptake of electric cars, topology of charging stations, environmental benefits, and costs for infrastructure. We use the case study of Zurich, which is representative of dense European cities.ResultsWe find that building charging stations in residential areas has net positive benefits, as long as the charging stations are used at least one-third of the daytime. Net benefits remain positive if we remove noise or climate benefits.ConclusionsAiming to equip 40% of public residential parking spaces with charging points, and then accelerating or slowing down the deployment of charging stations based on their actual use appears to be a robust strategy that will result in positive net public benefits for city residents and stimulate uptake of electric cars.

Performance Evaluation of Stochastic Systems with Dedicated Delivery Bays and General On-Street Parking

As freight deliveries in cities increase due to retail fragmentation and e-commerce, parking is becoming a more and more relevant part of transportation. In fact, many freight vehicles in cities spend more time parked than they are moving. Moreover, part of the public parking space is shared with passenger vehicles, especially cars. Both arrival processes and parking and delivery processes are stochastic in nature. In order to develop a framework for analysis, we propose a queueing model for an urban parking system consisting of delivery bays and general on-street parking spaces. Freight vehicles may park both in the dedicated bays and in general on-street parking, whereas passenger vehicles only make use of general on-street parking. Our model allows us to create parsimonious insights into the behavior of a delivery bay parking stretch as part of a limited length of curbside. We are able to find explicit expressions for the relevant performance measures, and formally prove a number of monotonicity results. We further conduct a series of numerical experiments to show more intricate properties that cannot be shown analytically. The model helps us shed light onto the effects of allocating scarce urban curb space to dedicated unloading bays at the expense of general on-street parking. In particular, we show that allocating more space to dedicated delivery bays can also make passenger cars better off.

Evaluation Model of Parking Equipment Planning and Design Based on Object-Oriented Technology

Stereo parking equipment has become an important means to solve the problem of parking difficulties, so it is necessary to study the planning of stereo parking equipment. This paper proposes an evaluation model for parking equipment planning and design, and verifies the feasibility of the model through an example. First, obtain the surface information of the planned area through object-oriented technology, and then complete the design layout of the area that can accommodate the most parking spaces according to the plan information map of the study area. Next, calculate the number of parking spaces required for each building in the area, and the number of available parking spaces within the maximum acceptable time for each building. Finally, compare the two to design the number and location of parking equipment. This method can quickly and accurately obtain the ground plane information map of the study area, while ensuring the capacity of parking spaces to meet the needs of users, it also improves the rationality and suitability of the planning and layout of stereo parking equipment, which can effectively guide the planning and construction of urban parking equipment.

Autonomous vehicles and urban space management

Discussions on how urban space would be transformed by the use of autonomous vehicles (AVs) are scarce. This study identifies the impacts caused by the shared use of AVs on urban parking and urban space management. An estimation method was formulated considering the reduction in parking demand, the possible alteration in vehicle ownership, and the reallocation of urban space. A case study was performed in a 673,220 m2 area through scenarios created by using real data of parking spaces and the results of previous studies. Results showed that parking spaces can be saved with the use of shared AVs, which would allow the reallocation of urban space to new uses (for example, implementation of around 12,000 bike-sharing docking spots, 10 km bike lanes, 7 km additional traffic lane or 140 ‘parklets’). The results contribute to revealing the positive impacts of AVs.

A Methodology of Evaluating Urban Parking System: Case Study of Delhi

A parking study is carried out in the NCT of Delhi to measure the parking system performance for different land-uses. Various parking statistics such as parking demand, demand-capacity (D/C) ratio, parking load, parking efficiency, and utilization are considered to demonstrate the parking conditions and problems at the selected parking locations. Further, four key-indicators viz., D/C ratio, search + park time, walk time and parking fees are chosen to develop parking performance index (PPI) which evaluate the parking facility from users’ perspective. PPI is a single value index, which is estimated by combining the evaluation criteria of the four indicators using a radial coordinate system. PPI is classified into four categories: Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor using clustering analysis in order to define the thresholds for each category. The paper demonstrates the case study application, which describes the applicability of the developed PPI at three locations in Delhi. Lastly, a few parking strategies and guidelines are discussed based on the analysis, on-field survey observations, and past literature. The proposed method can be adopted globally with the required modifications. The study is helpful for the transport planners and policy-makers to quantify the quality of the existing parking system, and the improvement plans can be made accordingly.