GPS Data and Car Drivers’ Parking Search Behavior in the City of Turnhout, Belgium - Geoinformatics for Intelligent Transportation - page 243

Fig. 2 Presentation of GPS tracking data on the street network of Turnhout, Belgium

speed is done by , minimizing the number of incorrect predictions

(compared to real world observations of parking search behavior). The starting
point of searching is set when the average speed is below 23 km/h (measured over 5
time periods) and the speed difference is less than 5 km/h as observed in the GPS
data.

' trial and error '

4 Analyses

The GPS information is stored in a (comma separated value — csv) data le

(Table 1 ) produced by the program DataLog. The program generates a data file with

several columns including time period (date and time), position of observation
(latitude, longitude, and height), and vertical and horizontal accuracy (PDOP,
HDOP, and VDOP, NSAT). The columns

are
used in this study. In Table 1 , the yellow box indicates the start of the search
process.
The data were analyzed in two different ways. First, the parking search time was
investigated in more detail. Based on the observations of 97 city oriented car trips
the following details can be noticed. The average car trip takes almost 14 min
(minimum of 1 min and maximum of 60 min. The average parking search time is
1 min and 18 s (minimum of 0 s and maximum of 6 min and 48 s). Figure 3 shows
the distribution (in classes) of parking search times over all 97 car trips. Approx-
imately 50 % of the parking search times are between 0 and 60 s. When this search

' Latitude ' , ' Longitude ' , and ' Speed '