Cruising or Parking

Cruising for parking is wasteful and imposes substantial costs on society through two channels: cruising and parking. In this paper, we study the chance for a transition from cruising and downtown parking as a complement (cruising for parking) to a potential substitute (cruising or parking), owing to the emergence of fully autonomous vehicles. Self-driving cars have no need to park due to their capability of empty repositioning after passengers are dropped off, opening up an unprecedented opportunity to use land formerly devoted to parking for other more valuable purposes. Specifically, we analyze whether travelers have an economic incentive to opt for circling around rather than parking and figure out the line of reasoning. We first derive generalized cruising costs and work out the way their components depend on speed. It is shown that cruising speed has a key role in determining the economic viability of cruising, and we lay out the theoretical foundation for it. Adding parking costs related to different parking price schedules allows us to formulate a decision rule for the cruising-parking choice. Using data for Germany reveals that driverless vehicle cruising may be economically viable in urban areas (i.e. where parking is usually not free), provided that cruising speed is at most around 10 km/h, so well below the driving speeds of conventional (occupied) cars moving in uncongested conditions nowadays. Then, we show that two of the main cost drivers affecting the competitiveness of cruising – energy tariffs and parking charges – are marked by tremendous spatial variation, regionally and nationally. By gathering international data on average parking and energy prices, we show that Germany is among the countries with the highest energy-to-parking price ratio. Reconsidering the competitiveness of cruising accounting for lower energy-to-parking price ratios suggests a substantially improved economic viability of cruising for many other locations. The competitiveness of cruising is more sensitive to parking costs than energy costs because the latter represent only a small part of the aggregate cruising cost. We close by discussing a number of far-reaching policy implications.