Evaluating Accessibility to parking lots

A store owner in an area where public transportation network is not very developed wants to grasp his store’s site condition considering car access, because residents of such an area usually move by private car. In this situation, evaluating accessibility for parking lots must not be overlooked. In this article, we will show a simulation for evaluating accessibility to parking lots.

There are 7 Ome municipal parking lots and 6 private parking lots in this area. The following illustration represents mapping of these parking lots.

In the simulation, we presume that visitors of this area park their cars in the closest parking lot from the present place.

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We set initial condition as follow.

(Step1) Each parking lot are stochastically set initial condition, occupied or vacant.

(Step2) In case of a parking lot that the visitor visit is vacant, the visitor park his car there and walk to the store by foot, otherwise the visitor go to the closet parking lot from the present parking lot. If next parking lot is also occupied, he go to the closet parking lot from the present parking lot……

(Step3) The visitor repeat Step2 till he can park his car.

(Step4) Simulation continue the Step1 to Step3 for 100 times in accordance with Monte Carlo simulation method.

Finally we calculate total time distance from start to arrival at a store (destination). We can regard this time as the accessibility of a certain store.

The following matrix is result of the simulation.

Basically, the more closer a store is to parking lot, the more convenient it is, but we clarify that a store where located in closer place to parking lot does not always have  high accessibility.