A downtown on-street parking model with urban truck delivery effects

This study presents an on-street parking model for downtowns in urban centers that incorporates the often-neglected parking demand of commercial vehicles. The behavior of truck deliveries is distinctly different from commuter parking: trucks do not cruise for parking spaces when parking is saturated, instead they are more likely to double-park near their destinations and occupy a travelling street lane. The study generalizes the downtown on-street parking model from Arnott and Inci (2006) to investigate the relationship between commercial and passenger vehicles’ parking behaviors, and provide tools for policy makers to optimize the trade-offs in parking space allocation, pricing, and network congestion. The social optimum can be obtained by solving a nonlinear optimization problem. The model is applied to a case study of downtown Toronto. It is shown that developing an inclusive policy, one that captures the effect of all road users including commercial vehicles, leads to considerable efficiency gains.