Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1963. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 114-120).

Finding a suitable parking space in busy cities is a time consuming and challenging task. During the searching process, drivers become frustrated and distracted. Motor vehicle drivers might not initially find a free spot, and will leave the area by making a loop to find another spot close to their destination. As a result, there is increased congestion on the road, sometimes causing accidents, and wasting valuable time. To address this problem, we believe that a parking reservation system is necessary and will help reduce the high volume of congestion that might otherwise lead to accidents and have many other environmental and health impacts. The objective of our research is to propose a mobile-based reservation system. The process of finding a free parking space shall be made easy and fast; customers will only be a few taps away from guaranteed and paid parking, based on their preferences. The model presented considers all nearby parking service providers’ ability to satisfy customers’ requirements and will reserve the best parking for the user.

When photographed at night these spaces float between necessity and abandonment; reminding us that all we have built could very easily be taken away leaving us with these quiet relics of a time that use to be, but no longer is. In a not-so-distant future these ramps stand as monumental representations of what is to come, soon to exist as monuments to the past. These will be the relics we leave behind, totems of an automotive culture.

0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

En stor mängd parkeringsböter ges ut varje år i Sverige. Tidningsartiklar uttrycker att parkeringsskyltar kan vara komplicerade att tolka och enligt flera studier finns en brist av förståelse gällande skyltarna. Denna studie har som syfte att ge förslag hur man designar en applikation för att hjälpa personer att undkomma problemet. Mer specifikt undersöks hur marknaden för befintliga parkeringsapplikationer ser ut, hur det upplevda behovet, samt intresset ser ut och kan skilja sig bland olika grupper. För att kunna besvara dessa frågor har både kvantitativ och kvalitativ data samlats in med hjälp av en enkät, dokument och intervjuer. Genom två forskningsstrategier, Design & Skapande och Undersökning samt via en användarcentrerad designmetod har studiens frågeställning kunnat besvaras. Slutsatsen av studien är att bland de mest använda redan befintliga applikationer som finns idag saknas funktioner som hjälper personer att tolka skyltar. Det finns ett starkt upplevt behov och ett stort intresse för en applikation som hjälper att tolka regler utifrån parkeringsskyltar. Behovet skiljer sig bland grupper, där förare som kör sällan i storstäder har ett större behov än de som kör mer frekvent. Resultatet visar även en antydning att personer i åldrarna 31–44 har ett mindre behov än andra åldersgrupper. Studien kom fram till att den mest användbara designen ska innehålla två nyckelfunktionaliteter. Det första är, att genom en kamera fota en skylt och få regler beskrivna, det andra är en karta där användare ser tillgängliga parkeringar och dess regler. / A large amount of parking tickets is handed out each year in Sweden. Articles in newspapers express that parking signs can be complicated to interpret and several studies show that there is a lack of knowledge regarding the signs. The purpose of this study is to develop a design proposition to help people avoid the problems with parking signs. More into depth research will be performed to analyse the market regarding existing applications, how the need and interest for an application can differ from groups. To answer these questions data will be gathered through a survey, document and interviews. By using two research strategies, design & creation and Survey the research questions could be answered. The conclusion of the market analysis shows that existing popular applications are lacking the functionality that helps people understand parking signs. The study also shows that a strong need and high interest is present for a parking application that aids people avoid parking tickets. The need differs from groups, where people who rarely drive in large cities have a larger need than those who drive more frequently. Another conclusion is that people aged 31-44 feel that they more infrequently need to have parking signs interpreted than other age groups. The study concluded that to get the highest usability in the application, two key functionalities should be included. The first one is a camera that can be used to take a photo of a sign and get the rules described. The second is a map where the users can see eligible parking spots and what the rules are.

Parking lots can no longer be the inhospitable, pedestrian-minimalizing, environmentally-degrading uses of valuable open space that are accepted and tolerated as the "norm". The open space that makes way for parking lots is too precious to be wasted on places that provide little or no comfort to the user while also contributing to the degradation of the environment. By inserting a fantastical landscape — one which engages the senses through color, texture, and smell — into the mind-dulling landscape of a large surface parking lot, the resulting comparison is a waking call about the missed opportunities of celebrating beauty and the environment. This gives value to the landscape in today's mobile society where the natural world appears to be losing ground to the automobile. This thesis proposes a series of landscape structures over a vast surface parking lot — Potomac Yard Shopping Center in Alexandria, Virginia — that provide open space,the ecological benefits of absorbing storm water runoff and preventing UV bounce back, while ultimately repositioning and rejoining the pedestrian with the landscape. The project does not set out to eradicate parking. Rather, the project recognizes the need for parking in today's mobile society but prioritizes the important connection that must exist between people and nature within that context. / Master of Landscape Architecture

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas State University Libraries

M. Tech. Civil Engineering / The transport sector accounts for 13% of all greenhouse gas emissions and is one of the few sectors where emissions are still growing. Car use is one of the principal contributors to greenhouse gas emissions in the transport sector. In this research an optimal park and ride facility that reduces automobile traffic congestion within the Central Business District (CBD) of the City Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality was investigated with a view to reducing greenhouse gases and their impact on climate. The use of park and ride transportation system is expected to reduce over 96.2% carbon emission by cars traveling along the A Re Yeng Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) line. Park and ride may be further researched for the feeder systems of the A Re Yeng BRT and within townships in the city of Tshwane metropolitan Municipality.

published_or_final_version / Urban Planning / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

This dissertation focuses on modeling parking search behavior in traffic assignment models. Parking contributes greatly to urban traffic congestion. When the parking supply is scarce, it is very common for a vehicle to circle around for a considerable period just for an open parking spot. This circling or "cruising" add additional traffic flow onto the network. However, traditional traffic assignment models either ignore parking completely or simply treat it in limited ways. Most traffic assignment models simply assume travelers just directly drive from their origin to their destination without considering the parking search behavior. This would result in a systematic underestimation of road traffic flows and congestion which may mislead traffic managers to give inappropriate planning or control strategies. Models which do incorporate parking effects either constrain their implementation in limited small networks or ignore the stochasticity of parking choice by drivers. This dissertation improves upon previous research into network parking modeling, explicitly capturing drivers' behavior and stochasticity in the parking search process, and is applicable to general networks. This dissertation constructs three types of parking search models. The first one is to model a single driver's parking search process, taking into account the likelihood of finding parking in different locations from past experience as well as observations gained during the search itself. This model uses the a priori probability of finding parking on a link, which reflects the average possibility of finding a parking space based on past experience. This probability is then adjusted based on observations during the current search. With these concepts, the parking search behavior is modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP). The primary contribution of the proposed model is its ability to reflect history dependence which combines the advantages of assuming "full reset" and "no reset" . "Full reset" assumes the probability of finding a parking space on a link is independent of any observations in the current search, while "no reset" assumes the state of parking availability is completely determined by past observations, never changing once observed. For instance, assume that the a priori probability of finding parking on a link is 30%. "Full reset" implies that if a driver drives on this link and sees no parking available, if he or she immediately turns around and drives on the link again, the probability of finding parking is again 30% independent of the past observation. By contrast, "no reset" implies that if a parking space is available on a link, it will always be available to return to in the future at any point. This dissertation develops an "asymptotic reset" principle which generalizes these principles and allows past observations to affect the probability of finding parking on a link and this impact weakens as time goes by. Both full reset and no reset are shown to be special cases of asymptotic reset. The second problem is modeling multiple drivers through a parking search equilibrium on a static network. Similar to the first type of problem, drivers aim to minimize their total travel costs. Their driving and parking search behaviors depend on the probabilities of finding parkings at particular locations in the network. On the other side, these probabilities depend on drivers' route and parking choices. This mutual dependency can be modeled as an equilibrium problem. At the equilibrium condition no driver can improve his or her expected travel cost by unilaterally changing his or her routing and parking search strategy. To accomplish this, a network transformation is introduced to distinguish between drivers searching for parking on a link and drivers merely passing through. The dependence of parking probability on flow rates results in a set of nonlinear flow conservation equations. Nevertheless, under relatively weak assumptions the existence and uniqueness of the network loading can be shown, and an intuitive 'flow-pushing" algorithm can be used to solve for the solution of this nonlinear system. Built on this network loading algorithm, travel times can be computed. The equilibrium is formulated as a variational inequality, and a heuristic algorithm is presented to solve it. An extensive set of numerical tests shows how parking availability and traffic congestion (flows and delays) vary with the input data. The third problem aims at developing a dynamic equivalent for the network parking search equilibrium problem. This problem attempts to model a similar set of features as the static model, but aims to reflect changes in input demand, congestion, and parking space availability over time. The approach described in the dissertation is complementary to the static approach, taking on the flavor of simulation more than mathematical formulation. The dynamic model augments the cell transmission model with additional state variables to reflect parking availability, and integrates this network loading with an MDP-based parking search behavior model. Finally, case studies and sensitivity analysis are taken for each of the three models. These analyses demonstrate the models' validity and feasibility for practice use. Specifically, all the models show excess travel time and flow on the transportation networks because of taking into account the "parking search cruising" and can show the individual links so affected. They all reflect the scattered parking distribution on links while traditional traffic assignment models only assign vehicles onto specified destination nodes. / text