Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

The number of cars searching for parking, also known as “cruising,” is a risk factor linked to increased pollution and congestion and decreased road safety. Although the detrimental effects of cruising are known, the actual amount of cruising is unknown. A novel video data set of naturalistic driving is shown to provide reliable estimates of cruising behavior. The distribution of search start times, search distances, and search times is characterized. Cruising behavior variation between 109 different drivers is also reported on in the study, located in southeast Michigan. It was found that 30% of the drivers generated more than 70% of the meters cruised. This finding suggests that the search strategies of a few drivers disproportionately affect the many. These results facilitate the estimation of the number of vehicles searching for parking and the amount of pollution generated by cruising drivers. Researchers may also use these results to develop more realistic models of parking search and parking interventions. The results, based on video data, have implications for settings in which video data are not available. The results from this study can serve as input to a model that classifies GPS traces as cruising or not cruising.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Simpson

H. S.

Downtown Storage Garages. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 133, 1927, pp. 82–89.

Hogentogler

C. A.

, Willis

E. A.

, Kelley

J. A.

, and Bibbins

J. R.

. Intangible Economics of Highway Transportation. In HRB Conference Proceedings 13, HRB, National Research Council, Washington, D.C., 1934, pp. 189–205.

Guo

, Gao

, Yang

, Zhao

, and Wang

. Modeling Travel Time Under the Influence of On-Street Parking. Journal of Transportation Engineering, ASCE, Vol. 138, No. 2, 2011, pp. 229–235.

Currie

, and Walker

. Traffic Congestion and Infant Health: Evidence from E-ZPass. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2009, pp. 65–90.

Brooke

, Ison

, and Quddus

. On-Street Parking Search: Review and Future Research Direction. In Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 2469, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington, D.C., 2014, pp. 65–75.

Inci

A Review of the Economics of Parking. Economics of Transportation, Vol. 4, No. 1–2, 2014, pp. 50–63.

Shoup

D.C.

The High Cost of Free Parking. Planners Press, Chicago, Ill., 2005.

Shoup

D.C.

Cruising for Parking. Transport Policy, Vol. 13, No. 6, 2006, pp. 479–486.

van Ommeren

J. N.

, Wentink

, and Rietveld

. Empirical Evidence on Cruising for Parking. Transportation Research Part A, Vol. 46, No. 1, 2012, pp. 123–130.

10.

Pierce

, and Shoup

D. C.

. Getting the Prices Right: An Evaluation of Pricing Parking by Demand in San Francisco. Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 79, No. 1, 2013, pp. 67–81.

11.

Millard-Ball

, Weinberger

R. R.

, and Hampshire

R. C.

. Is the Curb 80% Full or 20% Empty? Assessing the Impacts of San Francisco’s Parking Pricing Experiment. Transportation Research Part A, Vol. 63, 2014, pp. 76–92.

12.

Montini

, Horni

, Rieser-Schussler

, and Axhausen

K. W.

. Searching for Parking in GPS Data. Presented at 13th International Conference on Travel Behaviour Research, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2012.

13.

van der Waerden

, Timmermans

, and Van Hove

. GPS Data and Car Drivers’ Parking Search Behavior in the City of Turnhout, Belgium. In Geoinformatics for Intelligent Transportation ( Ivan

et al., eds.), Springer, New York, 2015, pp. 247–256.

14.

King

Estimating Environmental and Congestion Effects from Cruising for Parking. Presented at 89th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board, Washington, D.C., 2010.

15.

Thompson

R. G.

, and Richardson

A. J.

. A Parking Search Model. Transportation Research Part A, Vol. 32, No. 3, 1998, pp. 159–170.

16.

Ben-Akiva

, Koutsopoulos

H. N.

, Toledo

, Yang

, Choudhury

C. F.

, Antoniou

, and Balakrishna

. Traffic Simulation with MITSIMLab. In Fundamentals of Traffic Simulation ( Barceló

, ed.) Springer, New York, 2010, pp. 233–268.

17.

Benenson

, Martens

, and Birfir

. PARKAGENT: An Agent-Based Model of Parking in the City. Computers, Environment, and Urban Systems, Vol. 32, No. 6, 2008, pp. 431–439.

18.

Arnott

, and Inci

. An Integrated Model of Downtown Parking and Traffic Congestion. Journal of Urban Economics, Vol. 60, No. 3, 2006, pp. 418–442.

19.

Martens

, and Benenson

. Evaluating Urban Parking Policies with Agent-Based Model of Driver Parking Behavior. In Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 2046, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington, D.C., 2008, pp. 37–44.

20.

Horni

, Montini

, Waraich

R. A.

, and Axhausen

K. W.

. An Agent-Based Cellular Automaton Cruising-for-Parking Simulation. Transportation Letters, Vol. 5, No. 4, 2013, pp. 167–175.

Analysis of Parking Search Behavior with Video from Naturalistic Driving

Abstract

Get full access to this article

References