Spread of parking difficulty in urban environments: A parking network perspective

Abstract

Spread of parking difficulty can be regarded as a special cascading failure process of urban parking systems. A comprehensive understanding of this process can be greatly helpful to build a more robust parking system. Parking network, a specified complex network, is proposed to model, simulate, and analyse the failure process of urban parking systems in this paper. This model is applied to the analysis of parking systems in an abstract city grid and the downtown area of Luohu, Shenzhen. The results demonstrate that the parking network can capture subtle variations among various parking cruising behaviours or strategies from a network perspective. To enhance the utility of the parking network, an auxiliary indicator named “Parking Difficulty Index” is introduced to help assess the failure degree of urban parking system, estimate the optimal timing for parking guidance intervention, and evaluate the effectiveness of various guidance strategies in mitigating parking difficulties.