A New Flexible Parking Reservation Scheme for the Morning Commute under Limited Parking Supplies

Recent studies proposed parking reservation schemes in a bi-modal transport network to manage parking competition and traffic congestion. This study proposes a new flexible parking reservation scheme, under which commuters’ reservation can expire and those arriving later than the reservation expiration time can retain his reservation by paying additional late-for-reservation fees. Time-varying late-for-reservation fees are also examined. The proposed reservation scheme is more flexible and practical than those in the literature. Moreover, we found that, when compared to reservation scheme in the literature, the total social cost can be further reduced by an appropriately designed flexible reservation scheme in this paper. We also analytically and numerically quantify the efficiency gain of the proposed flexible parking reservation scheme.