The morning commute problem with ridesharing and dynamic parking charges

Abstract

This paper studies the traffic flow patterns in a single bottleneck corridor with a dynamic ridesharing mode and dynamic parking charges. Schemes with different ridesharing payments and shared parking prices are investigated. Besides the scheme with constant parking charges and ridesharing payments, dynamic parking charges and ridesharing payments are derived to achieve congestion-free traffic in the corridor. With the dynamic ridesharing ratios, it is found that genuinely nonlinear departure rates and travel time functions can be generated in certain ridesharing cases, which was not observed in the traditional ADL model (Arnott et al., 1990) for the morning commute problems without ridesharing or with constant ridesharing ratios. Moreover, comparing different configurations of ridesharing arrangements and parking charges, the results show that constant parking charges with constant ridesharing payments may not significantly improve system performance over the traditional morning commute with solo-drivers, while dynamic parking charges with properly selected constant ridesharing payments can achieve better system performance in terms of vehicle-miles-traveled, vehicle-hours-traveled and total travel costs, by encouraging ridesharing and spreading vehicular demand over time to eliminate queuing delays.