Manage the Curb: Optimization of Time-Varying Parking Zones in Micromobility Systems

Station based and free floating are the two established parking regimes of micromobility systems. The former restricts pickup and drop-off to designated stations, which is less convenient for users but reduces the nuisance of sloppily parked rental bikes and scooters. Free-floating micromobility allows users to use any public parking space within the operating area, which increases user flexibility but creates organizational overhead to deal with improperly parked vehicles. Time-varying parking zones, realized via curbside management software (CMS) and geofencing technology, promise a reasonable compromise in the convenience-clutter trade-off. Based on spatiotemporal information, the city administration can either permanently (e.g., pedestrian zones) or temporarily (e.g., weekly farmers’ market) block certain urban areas in their CMS. The micromobility providers, also having access to the CMS, must ensure that vehicles are not returned to undesignated areas with digital fences during the announced times. This paper introduces an optimization approach for micromobility providers to plan time-varying parking zones, given the dynamic municipal parking limitations. Opening and closing urban areas for parking not only requires a digital reaction (i.e., (un)blocking via geofencing) but also produces costs (e.g., removing the remaining scooters of previous periods from the market square). Hence, our optimization task aims to minimize the total costs associated with dynamic parking zones, whereas representative user trips are guaranteed travel within a given time budget. Based on this setting, we show that most urban stakeholders can profit from time-varying parking zones (compared with a static operating area). Our case study based on Berlin-Mitte shows that dynamic parking zones reduce urban space usage at decreasing service costs and only slight user concessions regarding their convenience.