Quality or convenience? Behavioral evidence on how facility grade influences urban destination choice

Modeling non-work activity destination choices is essential for urban transportation planning, as these activities involve greater flexibility and more complex behavioral decision-making than mandatory activities. However, existing studies often treat all facilities within the same activity category as homogeneous and have rarely examined how facility-grade heterogeneity shapes individuals’ destination preferences. To address this gap, this study develops a hierarchical location choice modeling framework that explicitly incorporates facility-grade distinctions into the destination choice process. Four common non-work activity categories—shopping, dining-out, recreation, and medical care—are analyzed, with urban facilities classified into high-grade and low-grade types. Destination choice sets are generated using fuzzy logic inference and stratified importance sampling that account for both travel distance and facility grade. Conditional logit (CL) and nested logit (NL) models are then estimated to capture alternative-specific utilities and within-grade correlations. Results show that (i) destination choices exhibit distinct decision-making logic across facility grades, with high-grade facilities usually planned for quality-seeking purposes and low-grade facilities primarily serving convenience-oriented needs; (ii) facility-grade heterogeneity significantly shapes destination choice behavior, with preferences varying across activity purposes and population groups; (iii) the nested logit results reveal correlated destination choices within facility-grade categories, highlighting the importance of accounting for within-grade substitution patterns when modeling non-work destination choices; and (iv) the effects of accessibility improvements vary across activity types, with stronger impacts observed for shopping and recreation and comparatively limited impacts for dining-out and medical-care. These findings highlight the critical role of facility-grade heterogeneity in shaping non-work travel behavior and offer new insights for demand analysis and facility planning.