Parking Planning With Route Assignment for Planned Special Events

During a planned special event (PSE), vehicular and pedestrian movements are concentrated around the PSE venue for short periods, leading to potential conflicts and safety issues. Vehicles tend to park as close as possible to the venue for the convenience of attendees. Taking into account the characteristics of PSE traffic patterns, a strategic vehicle parking planning model is proposed to integrally optimize the assignment of parking lots and inbound/outbound routes around the venue. Two prioritized objectives were considered for traffic safety and for the convenience of attendees. The proposed model was first validated in a small-scale example, and then adopted in a real-world case that took place in Taiyuan, China. The resulting parking plan presented an efficient reduction in the conflict points between vehicular and pedestrian movements, leading to an acceptable average walking distance for attendees. To evaluate the impact of different management preferences on the parking plan, a series of weights for conflict points were set according to potential conflict locations, occurrence times, and types. The results demonstrated that the number of conflict points with higher weights could be effectively reduced by the parking plan.