Street parking spots for automobiles are a scarce commodity in most urban environments. The heterogeneity of car sizes makes it inefficient to rigidly define fixed-sized spots. Instead, unmarked streets in cities like New York leave placement decisions to individual drivers, who have no direct incentive to maximize street utilization. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of two different behavioral interventions designed to encourage better parking, namely (1) educational campaigns to encourage parkers to "kiss the bumper" and reduce the distance between themselves and their neighbors, or (2) painting appropriately-spaced markings on the street and urging drivers to "hit the line". Through analysis and simulation, we establish that the greatest densities are achieved when lines are painted to create spots roughly twice the length of average-sized cars. Kiss-the-bumper campaigns are in principle more effective than hit-the-line for equal degrees of compliance, although we believe that the visual cues of painted lines induce better parking behavior.
Perhaps the most related paper in terms of our research is Cassady and Korbza @cite_5 , who study the performance of two different driver search strategies in minimizing (1) walking time, (2) driving time, and (3) combined time in reaching their destination in a typical parking lot layout. Like us, they are interested in analyzing the impact of drivers parking strategies. However, we are concerned with maximizing the utilization of scarce street parking in an urban setting.
@cite_5
2107903722
Upon entering the parking lot of a facility, a driver must select a parking space. This paper proposes and evaluates strategies which are intended to find a "good" parking space. Three performance measures are defined for evaluating the "goodness" of a selected parking space. One of these is based on the amount of walking required of the customer, another is based on the amount of driving required, and the third is a combination of the first two and represents the time required for the customer to reach the front door of the facility. Two strategies are defined for selecting a parking space. The first is simple and somewhat conservative, whereas the second strategy is more complicated and aggressive. A probabilistic approach is used to evaluate the three performance measures for each strategy using a parking lot of somewhat "typical" configuration. This approach treats driver decisions and parking space availability as random experiments, and uses conditional probability to evaluate the performance of the strategies.