The Potential Impact of Vehicle-to-vehicle Communication on On-street Parking under Heterogeneous Conditions

More and more municipalities and parking companies are willing to provide occupancy information to drivers. Information provision to drivers can potentially be beneficial in decreasing cruising. In crowded urban areas the ratio of cruising cars can raise up to thirty percent of all traffic. While most cities provide drivers with information on the occupancy rates of off-street parking facilities, information on single on-street parking places was non-existing until recently. The aim of this paper is to study the impact of bottom-up information provision on performance for on-street parking places under heterogeneous conditions. Using an agent-based simulation, performance is compared between a bottom-up vehicle-to-vehicle communication strategy and a strategy that combines parking sensors and vehicle-to-vehicle communication. In the latter approach on-street parking places are all equipped with sensors capable of disseminating their status. The results show that using a sensor-based strategy, search time is decreased for informed cars, especially under spatially heterogeneous conditions. Furthermore, the results point out that, under most conditions, informed cars outperform regular cars in terms of walking distance.