Measuring and Modeling Car Park Usage: Lessons Learned from a Campus Field-Trial

Transportation is undergoing significant change due to the growth of ride-sharing, electric cars, car-sharing, and self-driving cars. Organizations that have significant real-estate dedicated to on-premise employee car parking are therefore looking to adapt the use of this space, motivated by the opportunity to become greener, improve sharing, and pursue new revenue opportunities. In this paper, we outline our experiences from instrumenting, measuring, and analyzing car-park usage in our University's multi-storey parking lot, and building a model that explores its use for multiple purposes in the near future. Our specific contributions are as follows: (1)We begin by describing experiences and challenges in measuring car-park usage on our campus and cleaning the collected data; (2)We analyze data collected over 23 weeks (covering teaching and non-teaching periods)and draw insights into the usage patterns, including occupancy patterns by times-of-day and days-of-week, and identifying various user groups based on attributes such as arrival time and duration of stay; (3)We develop a queuing model to optimize the use of parking space for generating revenue from shared cars with minimal impact on private car users. We believe our study guides campus managers wanting to generate more value from their existing parking resources.