Relief from ‘Parking Wars’: Researchers Develop Software to Revamp City Parking
For thosewho live orwork in cities, parking is amajor source
of stress and frustration. Researchers estimate that for every 110 vehicles circulating on the roads looking for spaces, there are 100 available spots, both on-street and in parking facilities. Now, at Tel Aviv University (TAU), PhD student Nadav
Levy, with his supervisors TAU Prof. Itzhak Benenson and Karel Martens of Radboud University, the Netherlands, has developed a computer simulator that models real-life parking challenges of a particular district or city, identifying different strategies for improvement and testing the impact of new policies before they are implemented on the roads. When considering issues such as where to place parking lots
or howto establish the routes of the parking enforcement officers, [transportation] officials have few resources to measure the suc- cess of their choices. Their decisions, though seemingly mundane, have a high
impact on a city’s traffic flow. [For example,] up to 30% of vehi- cles driving in city center at peak hours are looking for park- ing, Levy said, wasting gas and creating congestion, pollution and noise. The simulator, called ParkAgent, takes into account real
parking policies, drivers and enforcement officers for an exact replication of any given city, including roads, buildings and park- ing lots. The software [also factors in the drivers’] probable desti-
nations, how long they require parking and how much they are willing to pay. The software assesses key values such as the drivers’ cruis-
ing time, how long they park and distance fromparking space to destination. The resulting data are analyzed to determine whether a policy would decrease the time the drivers would spend to find a parking place near the destination. ParkAgent has already been put to the test. Levy and his
supervisors have completed an analysis to determine the impact of an additional multistory parking garage in Ramat Gan, Israel, and are working in collaboration with the city of Antwerp, Bel- gium, to predict the outcome of a plan to replace a parking lot with a boardwalk along a river. (Source: American Friends of Tel Aviv University)
At least half a dozen new links to parking news are posted daily at
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