Exploring en-route parking type and parking-search route choice: decision making framework and survey design

This paper describes the first phase of an on-going research investigating the joint choice of parking type, parking facility and cruising-for-parking route. The importance of this issue derives from the significant share of cruising-for-parking traffic in urban areas, the relevance of parking policies as travel demand management tools, the growing interest in parking guidance information systems, and the need for representing parking-search behavior in traffic assignment and micro-simulation models. This paper addresses two main topics. First, the development of a methodological framework is introduced, including a behavioral model, its mathematical representation and the variable specification. Second, the design of a two-wave field survey accompanies the framework, with the aim of revealing the determinants of cruising-for-parking by retrieving both self-reported and GPS data. This paper concludes with a trajectory for the research completion and a discussion of data collection challenges yet to be addressed.