Evaluating the influence of parking space on the quality of service and the demand for one-way carsharing: a Zurich area case study

Abstract

The increased flexibility of one-way station-based and freefloating carsharing over the traditional round-trip carsharing comes at a price. These services encounter new problems, like unbalanced distribution of cars during the day, the necessity of the increased parking supply for one-way carsharing, parking deals with cities for freefloating vehicles etc. Therefore, the importance of tools suitable to investigate and to deal with this kind of problems is rising. Moreover, tools which are able to represent carsharing simulations on a disaggregate level and where the relationship of the supply with the demand can be analyzed have become a neccesity. The tool used in this work is a multi-agent transport simulation framework (MATSim). MATSim provides these features and was used here to investigate one of the important issues of one-way carsharing - parking. Based on simulations where different one-way carsharing scenarios for the city of Zurich was assumed, we observed and analyzed the influence of different parking-supplies on the behavior of carsharing users and the quality of service. Moreover, we present a strategy which allocates parking spaces to each carsharing station in order to satisfy the potential demand with the minimum number of parking spaces. The results show that different parking supplies influence the behavior of users, accessibility to carsharing stations, turnover and quality of service differently. The heuristic presented is successful in allocating the parking lots to the existing stations in order to satisfy the potential demand, while keeping the level of accessibility and turnover at the desired level.