Dynamic macroscopic simulation of on-street parking search: A trip-based approach

•A new parking search process is combined with a trip-based MFD model.•Considering distance with no parking spots improves the search process when the parking occupancy is not high.•The proposed framework individualizes vehicle travel distance depending on their parking strategies.•The proposed framework can quickly assess the impacts of new parking strategies or policies.•The model properly represents dynamic mutual interactions between parking and traffic conditions.•Technologies that improve parking searches for some users can also benefit to the full population.

This paper extends a trip-based aggregate dynamic traffic model to account for on-street parking search. The trip-based approach for a road network defined as a reservoir characterizes the internal traffic states by a macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) in speed while individualizing all vehicle travel distances. This paper first investigates distances to park for on-street parking based on real data in Lyon (France) and stochastic numerical experiments. An updated formulation compared to the existing literature is proposed for the relation between such distances and the parking occupancy. This new formulation is then incorporated into an event-based numerical scheme that solves the trip-based MFD model. The complete framework is able to account for different vehicle categories with respect to their parking strategies and to finely tune the related travel distances. Finally, the capabilities of the full framework are illustrated based on three different scenarios. The first two correspond to strategies with static and dynamic (reactive) switch of the demand from on- to off-street parking. While being very classical, they permit to demonstrate that the proposed model reacts as expected in such cases. The third scenario assesses the effect of a smart-parking technology that informs the users when a free parking spot is available on one of the downstream links at each intersection. In such a case, the model permits to estimate the benefit for the equipped users but also the impacts on all other vehicle categories. The three scenarios highlight that the proposed framework is versatile and can quickly provide a first assessment with a low calibration burden of different parking strategies or policies.

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