Bijection between frustrated parking functions and Stirling permutations

Construct a bijection that maps frustrated parking functions of length n with k lucky cars or, equivalently, k lucky spots, to Stirling permutations of order n with k descents.

Background

The paper proves that the number of frustrated parking functions of length n with k lucky cars or spots is the second-order Eulerian number. The same numbers also count descents in Stirling permutations, namely words of length 2n in which each element of [n] occurs twice and every element occurring between the two copies of i is larger than i. The authors explicitly ask whether these two enumerative interpretations can be connected by a direct, natural bijection.

References

Can one find a nice bijection that takes frustrated parking functions with $k$ lucky cars/spots to Stirling permutations with $k$ descents?

— Parking with Frustrated Drivers  (2609.35638 - Hallam et al., 28 Sep 2026) in Section 'Open Questions', Question following the discussion of Corollary \ref{cor:numWithKDescentsIsSecondEuler}