Determining, Explaining and Predicting Cruising for Parking – Working Paper

The research project “start2park” closes a research gap by precisely measuring parking search duration (cruising for parking) – especially the starting point of search – using a mobile app developed for this purpose. Complete journeys’ location data and durations are recorded, including driving until the start of the parking search, the parking search process, and the footpath from the parking spot to the final destination. Therefore, the causal effects of parking search on driving duration as well as journey duration can be estimated. Cruising for parking is traffic that results from car drivers looking for (free) kerb parking that meets their expectations (for example, free of charge or close to their destination point) and drivers being not (fully) informed about available kerb space parking locations. Parking search traffic causes external costs. Therefore, traffic-planning options should be designed to reduce unnecessary parking search traffic. However, this requires reliable data on urban cruising for parking traffic. Previous empirical results on the share of cruising traffic in total traffic, average parking search durations and average parking search distances differ widely. We show that the causal effect of parking search on driving duration and journey duration has not yet been validly estimated in empirical studies, and we explain how this is done in the research project.