CO2 Emissions Induced by Vehicles Cruising for Empty Parking Spaces in an Open Parking Lot

Parking lots are places of high air pollution as numerous vehicles cruise to find vacant parking places. Open parking lots receive high vehicle traffic, and when limited empty spaces are available it leads to problems, such as congestion, pollution, and driver frustration. Due to lack of return on investment, open parking lots are little studied, and there is a research gap in understanding the magnitude of CO2 emissions and cruising observed at open parking lots. Thus, this paper aims to estimate CO2 emissions and cruising distances observed at an open parking lot. A thermal camera was utilized to collect videos during peak and non-peak hours. The resulting videos were utilized to collect cruising trajectories of drivers searching for empty parking spaces. These trajectories were analyzed to identify optimal and non-optimal cruising, time to park, and walking distances of drivers. A new CO2 model was proposed to estimate emissions in smaller geographical regions, such as open parking lots. The majority of drivers tend to choose parking spaces near a shopping center, and they prefer to cruise non-optimal distances to find an empty parking space near the shopping center. The observed mean non-optimal cruising distance is 2.7 times higher than the mean optimal cruising distance. Excess CO2 emissions and non-optimal cruising were mainly observed during visitor peak hours when there were limited or no empty parking spaces. During visitor peak hours, several vehicles could not find an empty parking space in the region of interest, which also leads to excess cruising.