An AHP-Fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model for parking lots in urban CBD area

With the rapid growth of urbanization and motorization, the supply of parking facilities cannot satisfy the increasing parking demand, especially in the urban central business area. It leads to more serious parking problems, such as parking space shortage, parking congestion, illegal parking, bad parking service, unreasonable parking fees and so on. Therefore, a unified evaluation system of parking lots is required to assist urban traffic managers to understand the current situation of parking lots, and further to provide advices on the improvement of parking facilities. This paper establishes a comprehensive evaluation index system of parking lots to evaluate performance from two aspects: Operation efficiency and Service level. Moreover, based on the multi-stage fuzzy comprehensive evaluation and analytic hierarchy process methods, a comprehensive evaluation model is developed to evaluate the operation efficiency, service level and comprehensive level of parking lots. Furthermore, 18 parking lots in Xujiahui central business district in Shanghai, China are used to demonstrate the feasibility of the developed evaluation model, assisting to understand the current situation of parking lots, and thus to provide advices to urban traffic managers on the improvement of parking lots. Moreover, road drivers could also benefit from the evaluation model in choosing appropriate parking lots.