Abstract
This paper investigates a parking reservation mechanism to help reduce car cruising for parking, which not only makes drivers uncomfortable, but also harms the environment by air and noise pollution. To consider the benefits for drivers and parking facility providers, we suggest charging drivers for making reservations in addition to parking fees. A reservation pricing model that makes reservation prices equivalent to the value of saved searching time is developed. By modeling the number of vacant spaces as a stochastic variable and applying binomial pricing method, the parking reservation prices are obtained. Numerical examples based on the data for two different sized parking facilities in Taiwan are followed. The simulation results show that the proposed parking reservation system decreases the searching costs for these two parking facilities by 27% and 42%, increase the revenues by 13% and 25%, and reduce average emissions by 432 kg and 1,245 kg per week.
