DRIVER CHOICE OF PARKING IN THE CITY

Of relevance to urban transportation planning in a scenario studied he re are the choices of 5000 motorists among 55 parking lots and garages when travelling to one of 13 destinations in a city. These people beh ave as if they were minimizing a linear combination of driving distanc e, 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 faci lities. Also influencing driver choice is a random element with a stan dard deviation of 400 m of walking. None of these factors is significa ntly affected by parking duration. Estimators that maximize the logari thm of the Likelihood function have been determined by non-linear opti mization 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 charg es were reduced 97%, with negligible effect on accuracy by temporarily replacing the probit by the legit model during a preliminary analysis of the data. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd