In the morning rush hour, commuters choose their departure times based on a combination of factors—the chances of running into congestion, the likely schedule delays, and the parking space availability in the destination. This thesis investigates the morning commute problem with limited parking spaces in the city center. Parking reservation is proposed to mitigate congestion on highway and deadweight loss from parking competition. We show that, by setting aside an appropriate proportion of parking spaces for reservation, traffic congestion can be temporally relieved. The reason is that commuters without a parking reservation are compelled to leave home earlier in order to secure a public parking space. This analysis has then been extended to a many-to-one network where competiti...[ Read more ]

In the morning rush hour, commuters choose their departure times based on a combination of factors—the chances of running into congestion, the likely schedule delays, and the parking space availability in the destination. This thesis investigates the morning commute problem with limited parking spaces in the city center. Parking reservation is proposed to mitigate congestion on highway and deadweight loss from parking competition. We show that, by setting aside an appropriate proportion of parking spaces for reservation, traffic congestion can be temporally relieved. The reason is that commuters without a parking reservation are compelled to leave home earlier in order to secure a public parking space. This analysis has then been extended to a many-to-one network where competition for parking exists among commuters from different origins.

To further reduce total travel cost, a more elaborate reservation scheme with expiration times is proposed. In this case, a commuter with reservation has to arrive at the parking space for the reservation before a predetermined expiration time. We first show that if all parking reservations have identical expiration time, it is socially preferable to set the reservations to be non-expirable, i.e., without expiration time. However, if differentiated expiration times are properly designed, the total travel cost can be further reduced as compared with the reservation scheme without expiration time, since the peak will be further smoothed out.

A novel tradable parking permit scheme is then proposed to realize or implement parking reservations of commuters when they are either homogeneous or heterogeneous in their value of time. It is found that the expirable parking permit scheme with an infinite number of steps is superior to a time-varying pricing scheme in the sense that designing a permit scheme does not require commuters’ value of time information and the performance of the scheme is robust to the variation of commuters’ value of time. Although it is impractical to implement the ideal scheme with an infinite number of steps, the efficiency loss of a permit scheme with finite steps can be bounded in both cases of homogeneous and heterogeneous commuters. Moreover, considering the permit scheme may lead to an undesirable benefit distribution among commuters, we propose an equal cost-reduction distribution of parking permits where auto commuters with higher value of time will receive fewer permits.