A Time-Dependent Activity and Travel Choice Model with Multiple Parking Options

This paper employed the concept of temporal utility profile of activities to model the activity choice and parking behaviors, and it developed a time-dependent model in the framework of activity-based travel analysis. The model simultaneously considers traveler choices of activity type, activity location, activity duration, parking location, and traffic route over time of day. The decision-making process for these choices follows a hierarchical structure. The model is formulated as an equivalent variational inequality problem and is solved by a heuristic solution algorithm. The numerical results show that the proposed model can truly reveal people’s choices on the travel and activity behavior over time of day, and the induced occupancies in various parking locations. The findings also show that parking schemes such as increasing parking capacity, decreasing parking charges and the combination of both, will greatly influence people’s travel, parking and activity patterns, and thus the associated time allocations. The model presented can be considered as a coherent activity-choice parking demand analysis tool for long term strategy planning. By introducing the activity-based approach, the paper offers a new avenue of parking demand analysis for transportation planning and policy evaluation.