Parking in the City: The Model as a Tool for Policy Evaluation

Surprisingly, quantitative data about parking in the city are rare and models play a limited role in the analysis of urban parking policies, with few exceptions (e.g. Shiftan 2001). Much of the modelling literature regarding parking is theoretical in nature and has not been applied to real-world situations (e.g. Voith 1998; Petiot 2004; Lam 2006). Most policy-oriented work, in turn, hardly makes use of the potential offered by state-of-the-art modelling techniques (e.g. Ferguson 2003; Marsden 2006). Against this background, we propose using an agent-based model (Benenson and Torrens, 2004) to simulate urban parking policy scenarios and analyze their impacts from user and public policy perspective.