Parking pricing vs. congestion pricing: a macroscopic analysis of their impact on traffic

Abstract

This paper focuses on parking pricing and congestion pricing and their short-term effects not only on traffic congestion but also on the potential revenue for a city. We develop a multimodal macroscopic traffic and parking search model based on aggregated data at the network level. Our methodology allows us to analyze how introducing parking pricing inside a network, or a congestion toll combined with a park and ride (P+R) scheme can affect the drivers’ decision between entering the network by car or using P+R. This decision directly influences the number of drivers using P+R, and this impacts, in turn, the traffic performance. We illustrate our proposed framework in a case study of an area with a high parking demand for public parking spaces within the city of Zurich, Switzerland. Results show that parking pricing combined with P+R is indeed a viable option compared to congestion pricing for improving traffic performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Parking pricing
• congestion pricing
• park and ride
• dynamic macroscopic traffic and parking model
• cruising-for-parking

Acknowledgments

M. Menendez acknowledges the support by the NYUAD Center for Interacting Urban Networks (CITIES) funded by Tamkeen under the NYUAD Research Institute Award CG001, and by the Swiss Re Institute under the Quantum Cities^TM initiative.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss Re Institute under the Quantum CitiesTM initiative; Tamkeen under the NYUAD Research Institute Award CG001.