How Parking Prices Affect On-street Parking Duration? Evidence from a User Panel[Comment les prix du stationnement influencent-ils la durée du stationnement dans la rue ? Enseignements issus d'un panel d'usagers]

On-street car parking pricing is a tool of choice for urban access and space management. Yet, the effectiveness of parking pricing depends on how travelers adjust their behavior in response to price changes. While most existing research has focused on parking volumes, little is known about the determinants of the price elasticity of on-street parking duration. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing millions of parking transaction records from Lyon, linked to a novel data source for this topic: vehicle registration records. Exploiting a natural experiment and an instrumental variable panel regression, we estimate the price elasticity of parking duration and its variation across user and spatial characteristics. We find higher price elasticities where off-street alternatives are nearby and in areas with low commercial density, but lower elasticities among visitors traveling from more distant locations and among owners of newer, heavier, and more powerful vehicles. By showing who responds to prices and where, this study provides clear guidances for designing on-street tariffs to reduce traffic congestion and its externalities without compromising municipal revenues. This study also provides some of the first elements of evaluation of differentiated parking tariffs based on vehicle characteristics, a policy that Lyon was among the first cities to introduce and that is now gradually spreading elsewhere