Congestion Awareness Meets Zone-Based Pricing Policies for Efficient Urban Parking

Parking is at the heart of any modern city, considering its spatial influence and its role in urban mobility. It is also a key component of its urban landscape management and a critical component of an efficient transportation system. However, parking is still a source of environmental nuisance and quality of living collapse. There are many challenging issues that arise, such as land consumption, occupancy of public space, economic impact, pedestrian safety and social fairness. This becomes even more alarming in dense and ultra-dense urban environments where the availability of parking places significantly affects the traffic fluidity, and where a lack of parking spots is the main trigger of parking/traffic congestion. In this article, we propose a set of dynamic and zone-aware pricing strategies to solve the parking issues and traffic congestion. As a case study, we consider the administrative district of Casablanca city, the economic capital of Morocco. Our scheme is suitable for mixed-use areas, as it takes into account the presence of different driver profiles with different parking needs. Here, we aim to improve the rotation of attractive spots (located nearby zones of interest) and set a usage-based parking assignment via appropriate incentives. Inherently, this is equivalent to use strategic pricing to strategically control the parking dwell time, which ensures a usage-based fair sharing of public space among users and improves the traffic conditions in the target area.