Accounting for attitudes on parking choice: An integrated choice and latent variable approach

The well-differentiated impact that parking supply options produce on congestion, pollution and land consumption arouses the interest of policy makers for a better understanding of car user’s behavior when choosing a parking option. Despite the evidence on the advantages of hybrid discrete choice models, most literature on parking choice only involves observable factors while leaving aside issues related to the latent variables. The behavioral hypothesis is that parking choice process depends not only on a set of observable factors but also has to do with individual-specific latent attributes. A hybrid discrete choice model with interactions among attitudes and observable factors, as well as among socioeconomic characteristics and observable factors, was estimated in order to consider individual heterogeneity. The results showed that, in addition to parking fee, search time and access time, a Risk-averse attitude and a Positive car care (maintenance) attitude are determinants for parking choice. The inclusion of these latent attributes and their interactions also resulted in a large improvement in the goodness-of-fit of the model and affected the time valuations.