Dynamics of Peak Hour and Effect of Parking for Congested Cities

It has been recently proposed and tested in references (1), (3) and (4) that traffic in large urban regions (neighborhoods) can be modeled dynamically at an aggregate level, if the neighborhoods are uniformly congested. By exploiting the insights and the properties of a “macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD), this paper describes the rush hour dynamically in case of multi-region cities that are not uniformly congested. In this paper, a cruising-for-parking model is also developed. This model describes the physics of overcrowding caused by the phenomenon, it shows that cruising-for-parking affects all the users of the system, even those with destinations outside the “limited parking region” and it provided tools to estimate the direct costs of all users, as these expressed by additional vehicle-hours traveled. Also, it can describe the rush hour dynamically while vehicles search for a spot (properly recognizing that delays are greatest when flows are lowest, unlike existing economic models).