The Page-R{\'e}nyi parking process

Abstract

In the Page parking (or packing) model on a discrete interval (also known as the discrete R{\'e}nyi packing problem or the unfriendly seating problem), cars of length two successively park uniformly at random on pairs of adjacent places, until only isolated places remain. We give a probabilistic proof of the (known) fact that the proportion of the interval covered by cars goes to 1-exp(-2) , when the length of the interval goes to infinity. We obtain some new consequences, and also study a version of this process defined on the infinite line.