A study on parking supply optimization in central business districts considering the two-way interaction between car traveling and parking

Abstract

This paper proposes a bilevel programming model to optimize the parking supply in a central business district (CBD) considering the interaction between car traveling and car parking. The upper model (UM) determines the number and locations of parking lots in a CBD with the objective of minimizing the average impedance of all car trips. The lower model (LM) is a modal split and assignment combination model for calculating the traffic flow under various parking supply schemes. In addition to the bilevel model, a gravity model (GM) is proposed to calculate the car trips that are induced by the added parking lots. The interaction between car traveling and parking can be simulated by the feedbacks between the UM and LM. A case study is performed with real data from Dalian City. The results show that there is a negative correlation between parking supply increments and the average traveling impedance when the number of parking spaces is lower than the optimal value; however, the average traveling impedance will start to increase with the increase in parking supply when the number of parking spaces is higher than the optimal value.