GPS Data and Car Drivers’ Parking Search Behavior in the City of Turnhout, Belgium - Geoinformatics for Intelligent Transportation - page 240

searching for parking will likely increase in the future with several accompanying
effects such as a decrease of accessibility and attractiveness of destinations. For
transport planners and decision makers, reliable information about parking search
behavior is therefore important when assessing the accessibility of destinations and
environmental effects of traf

c in central business districts and shopping areas.
In the past, most studies focused on the number of cars searching for a free
space. To date, little attention has been paid to search time and the kind of streets
car drivers use while searching [ 3 ]. To the extent attention has been paid to parking
search time, the duration of search is mainly based on car drivers

assessment of
time [ 2 ]. This study aims at getting more detailed insights into both the temporal
and spatial aspects of car drivers

'

parking search behavior based on empirical data.
The research is still in the phase of exploration of data collection and analyses
methods. The study is an extension of a previous study in which the use of GPS to
investigate car drivers

'

parking search behavior was explored [ 4 ].
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. First, a brief overview is
given of existing insights and adopted approaches regarding (modeling of) parking
search behavior. Next, the adopted research approach is outlined. This section is
followed by a brief description of the data collection process. The

'

findings of the
data collection are described in Sect. 4 . The paper ends with the conclusions and
some recommendations for future research.

2 Parking Search Behavior

When car drivers approach their final destination, they start to look for a free

parking place. This last part of a car trip is de parking search

behavior [ 1 ]. Basically, parking search behavior consists of two components: a
temporal (time used for searching) and a spatial (streets used for searching) com-
ponent. Both components in

ned as car drivers '

uence the accessibility and the livability of areas.
Especially in dense inner-city areas, the presence of parking search traf

fl

uences
the accessibility by car and the livability of visitors and residents negatively. This is
one of the reasons that serious attention is paid to the issue of parking search
behavior, both by local authorities and researchers. Spitaels et al. [ 5 ] give a detailed
overview of several behavioral aspects that are related to car drivers

cin fl

' in parking

search behavior.
Previous studies could be divided into two groups: studies with a focus on
empirical insights and studies with a focus on model development. A recent study
regarding empirical insights is presented by Van Ommeren et al. [ 2 ]. Based on the
Dutch National Travel Survey (MON) for the years 2005 2007, they found that the

average cruising time is 36 s per car trip, that cruising time increases with travel and
parking duration, and that cruising has a distinctive pattern across the day. The
average cruising time is totally different from the times Shoup [ 1 ] presented in his
work (ranging from 3.5 to 14 min). Waraich et al. [ 6 ] already indicated that

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' the