Modelling the use of car parks in the province of Barcelona

Ferrer Sánchez, Josep

Modelling the use of car parks in the province of Barcelona

Citation

Ferrer Sánchez, J. Modelling the use of car parks in the province of Barcelona. 2021. handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10230/49218

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Abstract

Designing and generating wiser policies for urban systems and infrastructures is a challenge of paramount importance. Today, the cities that present the most successful transport strategies are prioritising the movement of people, giving residents and visitors a wider variety of attractive transport options while creating effective ways to switch from private to public transport means. Understanding the use and the impact of public infrastructures that facilitate mobility is crucial. We consider a dataset of one year of activity in the form of car park occupancy in the province of Barcelona. The data comprises ten different park station facilities located close to train stations. We propose and analyze different models based on statistical and mathematical techniques. First, we analyze the occupancy recordings in different park station locations and show that the activity is strongly coupled with the circadian rhythm, following a 24-hours cyclic pattern. Second, we perform a statistical characterization based on different activity prototypes for days associated with similar activity. We show that such a simple statistical model is enough to characterize accurately the car park occupancy. Third, we propose a mathematical model that explicitly captures the rise and decay of occupancy using a mixture of two different Gamma kernels. We optimize the parameters for each park station independently and show that the resulting model globally captures better the activity than the previous statistical characterization, in terms of accuracy, simplicity (has less parameters) and interpretability. Our results show that, despite the apparent complexity associated to public mobility and use of car parks, very simple models motivated in intuitive principles are sufficient to understand this dynamics to a large extent. Overall, our results can facilitate the design of public policies to facilitate the mobility within Barcelona and its surroundings, by providing a better understanding of how the citizens switch between private cars and public trains.