Improving travel efficiency by non-rigid expirable parking reservation

Abstract

Recently, Liu et al. (2013) extends Yang et al. (2013) by considering the parking reservation with expiration time, under which commuters with reservation have to arrive at the parking spaces before the expiration time. They found that when parking reservations have uniform expiration time, it is socially preferable to let the parking reservation to be non-expirable. This study further considers the non-rigid expirable parking reservation scheme, under which commuter with reservation arriving later than the expiration time can remain his reservation valid with an additional fee. In this case, different from Liu et al. (2013), the total social cost can be further reduced compared with the non-expirable parking reservation scheme considered in Yang et al. (2013). However, although total social cost is reduced compared to the non-expirable scheme, total travel cost (with unpunctuality fee) indeed increases. This implies, for individual commuters, travel cost increases.