Location attractiveness - is ITS becoming a high-ranked factor?

The development of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) has taken a leap in the past decade. Under strong influence of improved Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industries, automotive suppliers and scientific institutes have put much effort on developing a range of ICT based applications for vehicles to drive safer, more comfortable, to make more efficient use of current and future infrastructure and to manage fleets more accurately. These improvements in transport services might improve the attractiveness of nearby locations. These locations (office, residential, leisure zones etcetera), might attract more activity as they appear to benefit from increased accessibility. Therefore, the expectation that ITS concepts will, in the long term, have significant spatial effect on the location pattern of, in particular, office keeping organisations, is plausible. This paper focuses on the impact of ITS concepts on location preferences of office keeping organisations. To measure this impact a stated preference experiment has been conducted in the Netherlands and involves office keeping organisations in selected city regions. The paper describes the first results of a model describing the attractiveness of location profiles, which are based on location preference attributes, and the role of ITS in these profiles. Three ITS concepts, which are selected and based on previous research are introduced as ‘new’ attributes within the location profiles. The estimated model was used to test two hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that the introduction of these ITS attributes will change the preferences of office keeping organisations regarding locations. The second hypothesis is that if preferences will change, the ITS attributes have a significant contribution to the preference model; at least for some categories of organisations. Further, the paper describes in what cases we should accept or reject these hypotheses. Finally, some conclusions are drawn on the role of ITS in location attractiveness and the validation tools which are available to validate the preference model.