GPS Data and Car Drivers’ Parking Search Behavior in the City of Turnhout, Belgium - Geoinformatics for Intelligent Transportation - page 244

Table 1 Example of database produced by DataLog

60

50

40

30

20

10

0

0-60 seconds 61-120 seconds 121-180 seconds More than 180

seconds

Search times

Fig. 3 Distribution of parking search times in Turnhout, Belgium

time is related to the total travel time, it appears that on average 14 % of the total
travel time is used for parking search (minimum 0 % and maximum of 49 %).
In the second part of the analyses, parking search routes and included street
segments were analyzed in more detail. The GPS data were related to street seg-
ments of the urban street network using TransCAD (Fig. 4 ). After the calculation of
the number of times each street segment was used in the various parking search
routes, the numbers were related to some street segment characteristics. The use of
street segments is related to characteristics of the street segments using multiple
regression analyses. The (logarithm of) numbers of times are used as dependent
variable; while various street characteristics are used as independent variables (see
Table 2 ).
Figure 5 presents the number of times each street segment is used for parking
search. The numbers range from 0 to 237 times. The latter street segment is close to
one of the main parking facilities in the center. The figure also shows that car
drivers already start to search at a considerable distance from the core of the city
center.