Congestion Pricing: a Parking Queue Model

Congestion pricing imposes a usage fee on a public resource during times of high demand. Road pricing involves cordoning off a section of the city and imposing a fee on vehicles that enter it. Parking pricing increases the costs of on-street and perhaps off-street parking. Following an historical review, we develop a new queueing model of the parking pricing problem, recognizing that many urban drivers are simply looking for available on-street parking. Often, reducing the number of such “cruising drivers” would reduce urban road congestion dramatically, perhaps as effectively as cordoning off the center city. *Corresponding Author. Contacting information: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Room E40-231b, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139. E-mail: [email protected]. Phone: 617 253 3604; Fax: 617 258 7733. Acknowledgements We are grateful for helpful discussions and valuable information from Amedeo R. Odoni, Fred Salvucci, Akira Hibiki, and Robert Irwin. We also thank Cordell Hull for awarding a research grant to MIT to help support this research. In addition, we thank the MIT-Portugal Program, which supported this research, as well. Finally, we thank Judith Stitt for her professional excellence in helping to edit this paper.