Study On Park-and-Ride Facility Location Model

With the acceleration of motorization and urbanization in many Chinese cities,traffic congestion has become a bottleneck problem for blocking the urban development.Traffic problems become more serious, especially in big cities with high populationdensity. P&R (Park-and-Ride) scheme is considered to be an effective traffic demandmanagement measure. In the scheme, a number of parking facilities are constructed alongthe major urban traffic corridors so that the car owners living in the city’s suburbs candrive their cars to park at these parking facilities, and then change to the subway, lightrail or other high-capacity public transport modes to enter the city center.Park-and-ride systems force some of the vehicles outside the urban congestionareas, which can not only alleviate the parking pressures in city central areas but alsoreduce the traffic flows in the urban corridor. As a result, urban traffic congestion ismitigated, energy consumption is reduced and the urban environment is protected.Reasonable layout and planning of the P&R facilities and the proper parking charges willgreatly enhance the efficiency of P&R systems and the entire urban transportationsystem.This paper aims to investigate the P&R location problems along a linear urbancorridor. Assuming that commuters go to workplace located in the city center everymorning, and each traveler has three alternative modes to use: car, subway, and the P&R.First, this paper established a Logit model to model commuters’ mode choice behaviorbased on an in-depth analysis of travel disutility for different travel modes. Then, a P&Rfacility location model is proposed to determine the optimal location of the P&Rfacilities. A heuristic solution algorithm is also developed to solve the proposed model.Finally, a numerical example is employed to illustrate the proposed model. The resultsshow that the population density distribution along the corridor (such as uniformpopulation distribution and exponential population distribution) has an important effecton the traffic modal split, metro traffic volume, and the optimal P&R facility location.Therefore, the proposed model can serve as a useful tool to design the P&R system andthus provide an important theoretical basis for the P&R facility location for Chinesecities.