Parking enforcement policies for commercial vehicles

Commercial vehicles are of particular interest in parking enforcement because of their heavy presence in central business districts and their recurrent behavior of illegal parking. To deter illegal commercial vehicle parking, enforcement policies are defined by the citation fine and level of enforcement. This paper investigates how rational carriers react to a policy under steady state equilibrium conditions. To model the equilibrium, the paper uses the theory of bilateral searching and meeting where enforcement units meet illegally parked commercial vehicles at a rate which depends on the size of the two agents (illegally parked commercial vehicles and enforcement units). In assessing policy effectiveness, two objectives are defined which are profit maximization and social cost minimization. With the two objectives, the paper presents three market regimes and studies the equilibrium of each market. The proposed model covers several gaps in the parking literature by introducing illegal parking behavior elasticity with respect to parking dwell time, level of enforcement, citation fine, and citation probability. The model is applied on a case study of the City of Toronto and the results show that the citation probability increases with dwell time and the level of enforcement. Increasing either the citation fine or level of enforcement will hinder illegal parking but the obtained profit remains approximately constant. Sensitivity analysis on the meeting rate elasticity shows that profits are low when both elasticities are either high or low.