Searching for a parking space

Abstract

If you drive a car, it’s a classic problem on the busy city streets, the search for a parking space. Merely driving in the inner city is a challenging and frustrating affair because it is full of one way streets, dead ends, the visibility of surrounding streets is impeded by buildings and as we drive we are pushed ceaselessly forward from behind by other vehicles. If we pause for thought for more than a second we will be reprimanded by one or more car horns. How it is that masses of us move, as pedestrian or vehicular traffic, in an orderly way through space is also a classic problem for research in psychology, geography and other social sciences. From a distance it seems that the large movements of thousands of vehicles on the road must require explanations arising from another level, a macro-level. From close-by, observing the driver we wonder how she could possibly deal with such a fast complicated environment in their head. How many decisions would they have to make every second? For decision-making models of driving and transportation the point that getting a hold of a space to park our cars is, unavoidably, a search during which decisions are made, is all too often forgotten. As Thompson and Richardson (1998: 129) note dryly, ‘previous models of parking choice have not considered it as a search’(p159)