Parking Reservation for Managing Downtown Curbside Parking

Abstract

This paper discusses a smartphone-based parking reservation system that manages a finite number of curbside parking spaces located at various places in a downtown area. Parking reservation schemes are designed to minimize the total social cost of parking, which is assumed to be a weighted sum of the cruising times for drivers to travel from their current locations to allocated parking spaces and the walking times from parking places to final destinations. With the assumption of perfect information on cruising and walking times, a simple reservation scheme to achieve an optimum allocation of parking spaces is presented. However, although the locations of drivers can be retrieved from their smart-phones, it is shown that drivers have an incentive to misreport their final destinations for their own benefit, which compromises the system benefit. Thus, the Vickrey–Clark–Groves mechanism is applied to determine the allocation of parking spaces and parking fees to minimize the total social cost while ensuring that all drivers report their final destinations truthfully. Last, a revenue redistribution scheme to reduce drivers' financial burden further and increase public acceptance of the reservation system is discussed.