Where to park an autonomous vehicle? Results of a stated choice experiment

The future innovation and growing popularity of autonomous vehicles have the potential to significantly impact the spatiotemporal distribution of parking demand. However, little knowledge is gained on how people will choose to park their autonomous cars. In principle, an autonomous vehicle is not necessarily parked close by like traditional vehicles leveraging the automated driving and parking capability, still, the decision made by people is important for policymakers in urban and transportation planning. This study attempts to gain useful insights to understand people’s parking location choices for autonomous vehicles. A stated choice experiment was designed, allowing people to choose a parking location for autonomous vehicles in varied contexts, including time windows, picking-up times, and the requirement for on-time arrival at the next activity. We found that similar to conventional cars people generally prefer cheaper and/or closer parking lots for autonomous vehicles. However, the distance between a parking lot and the activity location is relatively longer in the case of autonomous vehicles. The amount of time an autonomous vehicle spends in congestion while picking up the users influences the choice of parking locations. Moreover, substantial preference heterogeneity between individual people was found in the parking choice behavior. The maximum value of access time for autonomous cars is 34 $/h which is higher than the empirical value of walking time for conventional cars. Results of elasticity indicate that the influence of parking fees is larger than that of access time and congestion time.