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Calculating willingness to pay (WTP) is especially important whencarrying out profitability studies. Feasibility studies forunderground car parks are an example of the importance of thecorrect evaluation of WTP. The profitability of the car park has tobe calculated as exactly as possible to provide information at thetime of tendering for its construction and franchise.Willingness to pay is known to be very sensitive to modelspecification. At first, even in small towns, paid parking placescan prove to be very unpopular with most people. Street spaceis a scarce commodity belonging to everyone and should becharged for when used individually just like other publicproperty.Space is critical in areas of high commercial and demographicconcentration such as city centres. In Europe parking places arenormally regulated by using blue zones (regulation of space andwaiting time) and public car parks (regulation by fee), which canbe located either on the surface or underground. Rather than beingprofit orientated, policies for regulating street parking should beaimed at improving traffic flow, favouring the rotation of parkingspaces and freeing up areas for loading and unloading at certaintimes. Therefore, when new urban projects are started, such asshopping centres, cinemas or buildings for other leisure activities,any public and private projects should include a study on the needfor parking places and their probable effects on traffic flow in andaround the site location.The closest study to this work is that of Axhausen and Polak,1which models parking choice using a stated preference survey. Asimilar study can be found in the article by Hensher and King.2Various types of parking were used in a study by Van der Goot3 inwhich a logit model was applied to model the choice of parking asa function of attributes. Other relevant studies on modelling userbehaviour when parking are those of Hunt,4 Ergu¨n5 and Gillen6 inwhich no mention is made of the correct calculation of WTP northe problem of its variability with respect to the specification ofthe utility functions during the design of the discrete choicemodels. In fact none of the above-mentioned works highlight thislatter problem.The international literature also provides many examples ofstudies made on the impact of parking pricing policies,7–10parking simulation models such as Pamela11 and the developmentof parking choice models for special events such as in the articleby Sattayhatewa and Smith.12Interesting work has also been done on car parks andaccessibility such as that of Ferguson13 who studied userresponses to changes made in the supply, location, price andaccessibility of parking.With the exception of the study by Hess and Polak,14 no otherrelevant studies are known which try to model user behaviourwhen choosing between different types of parking and which alsocalculate WTP to save time to final destination.The objective of this investigation was to simulate user behaviourwhen parking. A stated preference survey was used to present theuser with different situations. A trial was made at introducingrandom ranges into the levels of the variables used in the design ofa stated preference survey and a study was made of their effects onwillingness to pay.The study and modelling of user behaviour using discretechoice models allows a calculation to be made for the user’swillingness to pay in exchange for quicker or improved accessto final destination. Willingness to pay is a fundamentalvariable which is used, or should be used, in the social andeconomic assessment of construction projects and the runningof car parks because it provides a sufficiently clear idea of thecorrect tariff to charge and takes into account other points ofimportance to the user. There are several relevant studies onthis subject.Transport 162
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