With increasing demand, parking spaces have become a vital part of urban living and efficient parking management has become more important. In many metropolises, it is often the case that finding a parking slot in downtown areas often constitutes an appreciable fraction of the total travel time due to lack of available parking spaces and the parking fees may well exceed the total vehicle operating costs. It is also a fact that a massive number of private parking slots are available during daytime in nearby residential compounds because those residents drive their cars to work. Thanks to the emerging platform economy enabled by the fast-growing mobile apps in our daily life, parking pains can be relieved from one peer to another. By making vacant private parking slots publicly av...[ Read more ]

With increasing demand, parking spaces have become a vital part of urban living and efficient parking management has become more important. In many metropolises, it is often the case that finding a parking slot in downtown areas often constitutes an appreciable fraction of the total travel time due to lack of available parking spaces and the parking fees may well exceed the total vehicle operating costs. It is also a fact that a massive number of private parking slots are available during daytime in nearby residential compounds because those residents drive their cars to work. Thanks to the emerging platform economy enabled by the fast-growing mobile apps in our daily life, parking pains can be relieved from one peer to another. By making vacant private parking slots publicly available to drivers in need through an e-parking platform, shared parking not only allows the owner to earn additional income but also helps alleviate the shortage of parking spaces.

While private parking sharing has already become a reality, relevant research is rather limited. This appears to be another case where academic research lags behind developments in the industry. We thus propose this project to address the pressing research need imposed by such emerging parking innovations initiated by the industry. We shall focus on the economic analysis and modeling of the pricing strategies of e-parking platforms in a two-sided parking sharing market, which have a great impact on the size of the two pools: the private car park owners who are willing to rent out their parking slots and the public users who prefer to utilize private parking slots.

To this end, in this thesis, we examine three major issues; The first issue is to design a basic model for reservation and allocation of shared parking slots by using a binary integer linear programming, which maximizes the revenue of the shared parking platform; The second issue is to develop matching and allocation mechanisms between parking spot owners and parking spot users in a two-sided parking sharing market, and determine the pricing strategies of a single e-parking platform; Finally, the third issue is to determine the pricing strategies under hybrid modes of shared private parking and cruising for general public parking and establish the appropriate regulatory regimes for efficient use of parking resources.