Congestion Pricing: A Parking Queue Model

Drivers in urban neighborhoods who patrol streets, seeking inexpensive on-street parking createa significant fraction of measured traffic congestion. the pool of drivers patrolling at any timecan be modeled as a queue, where ‘queue service’ is the act of parking in a recently vacatedparking space and queue discipline is siro – service in random order. we develop a queueingmodel of such driver behavior, allowing impatient drivers to abandon the queue and to settle formore expensive off-street parking. we then relate the model to the economic theory ofcongestion pricing, arguing that price differentials between on-street and off-street parkingshould be reduced in order to reduce traffic congestion. reducing the number of “patrollingdrivers” often can reduce urban road congestion significantly, in some cases as effectively astechnologically expensive road pricing schemes that cordon off the center city.