Modeling heterogeneous parking choice behavior on university campuses

ABSTRACT

Studies on campus parking indicate more severe problems and a wider range of characteristics than commercial parking because of limited parking places, special conditions, specific policies and enclosed space on university campuses. Heterogeneous characteristics are usually ignored in analyses of campus parking behavior. In this paper, a mixed logit model is applied to analyze parking choice behavior on a campus using data collected from a stated-preference survey of Tongji University, Shanghai, China. The heterogeneity of individuals with various sociodemographic characteristics is evaluated by interaction terms and random parameters. Comparison between the proposed approach and the conditional logit model shows that the results of the mixed logit model are more interpretable because they are not limited by the independence from irrelevant alternatives assumption. Key factors that have considerable effects on campus parking choices are identified and analyzed. Important regularities are also concluded from elasticity analyses. Finally, the campus is divided into two areas according to the walking distance to a new parking lot, and the modeling results show that area-specific policies should be established because the two areas have quite distinct parking choice features.

KEYWORDS:

• Parking choice
• university campus
• heterogeneity
• mixed logit model
• stated preference
• elasticity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Research Postgraduate Studentship from the University of Hong Kong; a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. 17208614); and a research grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, No. 71371143).