Driver choice of parking in the city

Abstract

Of relevance to urban transportation planning in a scenario studied here are the choices of 5000 motorists among 55 parking lots and garages when travelling to one of 13 destinations in a city. These people behave as if they were minimizing a linear combination of driving distance, walking distance and parking fee. Walking is six times more costly than driving. Multi-level garages directly connected to a destination point have a special attraction equivalent to four normal parking facilities. Also influencing driver choice is a random element with a standard deviation of 400 m of walking. None of these factors is significantly affected by parking duration. Estimators that maximize the logarithm of the likelihood function have been determined by non-linear optimization techniques. Calculation of standard errors has been modified to accommodate a lack of statistical independence between the results for different payment periods or walking destinations. Computing charges were reduced 97%, with negligible effect on accuracy by temporarily replacing the probit by the logit model during a preliminary analysis of the data.