Milenko Vrtic

Influence of parking on location and mode choice

This paper assesses the effects of parking availability on behavioral responses by travelers, and which approaches are appropriate for modeling those responses. In addition to the well-known trade-offs between travel times and fuel or transit ticket costs, parking search times and costs have a significant impact on travelers’ decisions. A stated choice study of parking, location, and mode choice was conducted to assess those choices. The survey was conducted with a sample of more than 1’200 pre-recruited respondents in Switzerland. Several characteristics of the respondents’ regular travel were recorded during a recruitment interview, which the stated choice experiments were based on. The overall response rate was over 80 percent, and more than 14’000 observations were used for the estimation of the choice models presented here. Two different modeling approaches were tested: one with a deterministic model of taste heterogeneity (using interaction terms for trip distance, duration and income, as has been the practice in earlier studies), and one applying a random parameters approach. Both models were estimated in willingness-to-pay space. The model results indicate that parking characteristics have a significant effect on mode and location choice. The sample distributions for the relevant willingness-to-pay measures and the sample average demand elasticities inferred by the two models, as well as the overall model fit statistics, are slightly different. The deterministic assessment of taste heterogeneity is preferable for application in forecasting models, as it allows the direct computation of the expected effects of a policy on market shares.