Daily Commuting and Parking Pattern under the Fully Station-Based One-Way Carsharing Vehicle Environment

Abstract

This study is the first in the literature to investigate the joint equilibrium of departure time and parking location choices in the station-based one-way carsharing system. Time-varying road tolls are optimized to eliminate queueing deadweight loss, minimize schedule delay cost, and induce an economically efficient parking pattern. The round-trip commuting pattern under the fully privately owned vehicle environment was also studied, and the aggregate social cost of the two travel modes are compared with each other to verify the potential benefit gained from implementing the one-way carsharing service. We then investigated demand elasticity with respect to the user’s daily travel cost in a one-way carsharing-only system, and an externality-based charging mechanism is proposed to achieve the optimal demand-supply level. In the one-way carsharing-only travel mode, the following results were obtained: (1) the evening commute pattern is not a simple mirror image of the morning one when spatial parking is considered in both scenarios with and without pricing; (2) when taking account of elastic demand, in optimal time-varying pricing regimes, the charging scheme automatically leads to the socially optimal demand level, but in free-pricing regime, additional user anonymous tax must be charged to achieve the optimal demand level; and (3) the station-based one-way carsharing service benefits the public in aggregate social cost saving compared with the mode of driving a self-owned car.