The impact of the parking situation in shopping centres on store choice

The article discusses the effects of changing the parking situation in the surrounding of shopping centres on consumers store choice behaviour. To get insight into these effects a hierarchical logit model of parking lot and store choice behaviour is estimated and validated. The research is based on before-and-after data of supermarket visitors collected in a major regional shopping centre in a suburban area in The Netherlands. The model is estimated using the before data. At the level of the supermarkets the estimated hierarchical logit model performs very well. The model is less accurate at the level of parking lots but still performs satisfactory. Significant attributes are a constant representing the characteristics of the supermarket, the distance between supermarket and parking lot, the number of parking spaces per parking lot, the location of the parking lot vis-a-vis the origin of the consumer, and the availability of supermarket trolley facilities at the parking lot. Validating the model by reproducing the after data yields less satisfactory results. Especially the model does not perform very well on predicting parking lot choice.