Cars are designed to be driven, but spend most of their time parked. Worse still, a significant share of metropolitan traffic is caused by cars cruising for parking ! Despite the centrality of this problem in transport policies, the statistical laws governing parking search are only dimly understood. Even the origin of the major surge of the search time long before the global occupancy saturates was unclear.
Our team has shown that, for this issue pertaining to transport science, an original transfer of methods from another field (namely, statistical physics and graph theory) was highly efficient. Benefits can be wreaped for the theoretical derivation of the laws governing the search time in a generic way, but also for the simulation of realistic case studies, here, the case of the City of Lyon. These findings have been published in the journal Transportation Science.
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