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Nilankur Dutta

Publications and source records attributed to Nilankur Dutta.

3 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2025

Model-Based Assessment of__the__Cruising Traffic and Environmental Impact of__Parking Restrictions

In many large metropolitan areas, cars cruising for parking significantly contribute to congestion and pollution. At the same time, parking restrictions are contemplated to encourage the use of greener transport alternatives. We give a short overview of a versatile modelling framework for parking search, which can be solved by both numerical simulations and theoretical developments, and we illustrate its applicability in Lyon, France. Then, we show how this framework can be leveraged to assess the environmental impact of parking restrictions, weighing the antagonistic effects of the thus-induced excess cruising vs. mode shift.

physics.soc-ph↗
arXiv2023

Parking search in urban street networks: Taming down the complexity of the search-time problem via a coarse-graining approach

The parking issue is central in transport policies and drivers' concerns, but the determinants of the parking search time remain relatively poorly understood. The question is often handled in a fairly ad hoc way, or by resorting to crude approximations. Very recently, we proposed a more general agent-based approach, which notably takes due account of the role of the street network and the unequal attractiveness of parking spaces, and showed that it can be solved analytically by leveraging the machinery of Statistical Physics and Graph Theory, in the steady-state mean-field regime. Although the analytical formula is computationally more efficient than direct agent-based simulations, it involves cumbersome matrices, with linear size proportional to the number of parking spaces. Here, we extend the theoretical approach and demonstrate that it can be further simplified, by coarse-graining the parking spot occupancy at the street level. This results in even more efficient analytical formulae for the parking search time, which could be used efficiently by transport engineers.

physics.soc-ph↗
arXiv2023

Parking search in the physical world: Calculating the search time by leveraging physical and graph theoretical methods

Parking plays a central role in transport policies and has wide-ranging consequences: While the average time spent searching for parking exceeds dozens of hours per driver every year in many Western cities, the associated cruising traffic generates major externalities, by emitting pollutants and contributing to congestion. However, the laws governing the parking search time remain opaque in many regards, which hinders any general understanding of the problem and its determinants. Here, we frame the problem of parking search in a very generic, but mathematically compact formulation which puts the focus on the role of the street network and the unequal attractiveness of parking spaces. This problem is solved in two independent ways, valid in any street network and for a wide range of drivers' behaviours. Numerically, this is done by means of a computationally efficient and versatile agent-based model. Analytically, we leverage the machinery of Statistical Physics and Graph Theory to derive a generic mean-field relation giving the parking search time as a function of the occupancy of parking spaces; an expression for the latter is obtained in the stationary regime. We show that these theoretical results are applicable in toy networks as well as in complex, realistic cases such as the large-scale street network of the city of Lyon, France. Taken as a whole, these findings clarify the parameters that directly control the search time and provide transport engineers with a quantitative grasp of the parking problem. Besides, they establish formal connections between the parking issue in realistic settings and physical problems.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗