Optimization models for the Urban Park Pricing Problem

Park pricing strategies are an important tool for rebalancing the modal split between personal car and transit systems in urban area. In fact, the high levels of congestion are mainly due to the preference of users for the private car system. In order to obtain a more equilibrate modal split it is possible, jointly with the improvement of transit system quality, to impose fares on use of private cars; it can be obtained by road pricing and/or park pricing strategies. Park pricing strategies are the simplest ones, since they can be managed without the adoption of advanced technologies. In this paper some park pricing strategies are proposed and some optimization models are formalized; these optimization models search for the optimal parking fares optimizing the value of an objective function. In the paper, therefore, some solution algorithms are proposed and numerical results obtained on a test site are reported.