The national and international evidence base for parking policy is surprisingly thin in spite of the intensity of its discussion in transport and landuse planning (For the best summary see Shoup, 2005). To close this gap the project pursues two approaches: a set of stated preference (SP) surveys to address the short- and longer term choices (parking type, search strategy, parking location, duration of stay) in conjunction with the choice of mode, destination, frequency of visit and car ownership; second a detailed analysis of an existing GPS data set to derive parking search times as a function of the degree of saturation of the supply.

The SP experiments are based on the on-going KEP survey of the Swiss Federal Railroads. The estimated choice modells is applied in a set of scenarios to assess the impact of parking policy on CO2 emissions. The scenarios were implemented both in aggregate models, as well in the agent-based micro-simulation framework MATSIM. Both types of models benefit from the various models estimated, especially the parking search time model, as well as the parking choice models.