In densely populated urban settings, finding a place to park can be a real problem. Drivers often find themselves driving around and around for an extended period of time trying to find a place to park their car, leading to wasted time, gasoline, producing tons of carbon dioxide that is harmful to the environment, not to mention sheer frustration.
Fortunately, some smartphone apps have begun to emerge that assist drivers with finding available spaces. Some of these apps include SFpark, ParkMe, SpotHero and ParkWhiz, to name a few. But how well do they work? And what are the implications for reducing traffic congestion? Those questions and more are what Dr. Yafeng Yin, an associate professor at the UF Department of Civil & Coastal Engineering, and his research team affiliated with the UFTI will be investigating via a project funded by the National Science Foundation (Project #: CMMI-1362631), in collaboration with Dr. Yingyan Lou and her team at Arizona State University.
“The overarching goal of this project is to provide analytical foundations and methodologies for analyzing emerging parking management services, including parking information, reservation and navigation,” Yin said. “We would like to reveal their working mechanisms, and understand better their implications on parking competition and how they influence temporal or spatial travel demand distributions in many downtown areas.”
To find answers, the research team will apply Game Theory and behavioral economics to analyze how drivers’ parking search behaviors would change while using these smartphone parking apps. A set of analytical tools will be generated that will help explain how they could play a role in reducing traffic congestion, and the researchers hope to generate a plan for optimizing their implementation and design. Agent-based simulation will be used to test the theories and unveil complex outcomes of parking competition under realistic parking search behaviors.
“We hope that our research findings yield smarter ways to manage public parking spaces in downtown areas,” Yin said. “Our goal is to reduce cruising for parking and social costs associated with it. The parking industry may have been old fashioned and slow moving. However, the industry will undergo a shift and there will be a tipping point soon. The ‘Internet of Things’ will transform the industry and parking management will be data driven.”
For more information, contact Dr. Yafeng Yin at yafeng@ce.ufl.edu.