Modelling parking lot choice in the context of shopping trips

Research on micro behaviour of pedestrians in shopping centres has shown that shop and route choice within the shopping centre largely depend on where pedestrians enter the shopping centre. In turn, the choice of entry point depends on the choice of parking lot. This means that manipulating characteristics of parking lots in the vicinity of a shopping centre may have strong effects on micro behaviour wthin that shopping centre and, consequently, on the turnover of individual shops. This paper describes the results of an attempt to model choice set composition and parking lot choice by shoppers. Attention is paid to the familiarity of individuals with available choice alternatives. Differences in individual knowledge of available parking lots is related to the home location of the shoppers and the route to the shopping centre. Multinomial logit models are estimated using data on choice sets, observed parking lot choice, and several characteristics of the parking lots which include the number of parking units per lot, the accessibility of each parking lot, and the location of each parking lot vis-a-vis the location of (specific) shops in the shopping centre. The analyses are based on data collected in the fall of 1993 in the main shopping centre of Veldhoven, a small tovvn in the south of the Netherlands.