Balance of demand and supply of parking spaces

It is always a controversial issue on whether the demand and supply of park ing spaces should be balanced. This paper investigates the effects of balan cing the parking demand and supply. A bilevel programming model is proposed to determine the minimum supply of parking space required taking into acco unt the elasticity effects of road congestion and parking delays on parking demands. The lower-level problem is an equilibrium trip distribution/assig nment problem with variable parking delay, while the upper-level problem is to minimise the total number of parking spaces in traffic zones by conside ring motorists' route and destination choice behaviour and satisfying the a ttraction-end parking demand constraints, A sensitivity analysis based heur istic algorithm is developed to solve the proposed bilevel problem and is i llustrated with a numerical example.