INVESTIGATING USER REACTIONS TO PRICING STRATEGIES AT OVERCROWDED PARK AND RIDE FACILITIES

ABSTRACT

Investigating User Reactions to Pricing Strategies at Overcrowded Park and Ride Facilities

Park-and-Rides are an effective way to increase transit accessibility. However, many park-and-ride facilities in operation today are overcrowded and the agencies that mange these services want to determine how to use the limited parking spaces available more efficiently. User preference survey data for a variety of alternative pricing strategies collected in the Puget Sound region, which currently does not charge for parking at parkand-rides, was analyzed to determine how effective these strategies might be at improving the person occupancy of these spaces.  Previous work on this topic is very limited as many current facilities do not utilize any type of pricing strategy, and the general use of park-and-rides is not well studied.  This work attempts to develop some insight into which types of strategies may best fit the needs of the facility patrons and the characteristics of a variety of facility types.  By asking park-and-ride users generalized questions relating to the possibility of changing their commute methods to include carpooling, parking fees, and guaranteed parking spaces, a more broad idea of park-andride users’ preferences was concluded.  Statistical tests (e.g., normal tests and chi-squared tests) were utilized to determine if any facilities in particular were outliers, and this information was used to identify special characteristics of these facilities.  In addition, logistic regression models were developed to determine a “profile” of transit users and

their preferences toward various pricing schemes.

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ……………………………………………………………………………………………….. v

List of Tables ………………………………………………………………………………………………… vi

Chapter 1 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………. 1

Research Objectives ………………………………………………………………………….. 3

Chapter 2 Literature Review ……………………………………………………………………………. 5

Benefits and disbenefits ……………………………………………………………………… 6

Studies on park-and-ride efficiency ……………………………………………………… 9

Strategies to induce mode shift ……………………………………………………………. 12

Mode shift strategies at park-and-ride facilities …………………………………….. 16

Summary of Literature Review …………………………………………………………… 19

Chapter 3 Data Collection Execution and Organization ………………………………………. 20

Audit Data Collection Goals and Methods ……………………………………………. 20

Survey Distribution Methods ……………………………………………………………… 24

Chapter 4 Data Analysis …………………………………………………………………………………. 34

Survey Data Adjustment …………………………………………………………………….. 36

Summary Statistics ……………………………………………………………………………. 38

Identification of Park-and-Ride Facility Outliers …………………………………… 43

Regional Analysis ……………………………………………………………………………… 49

Mode Analysis ………………………………………………………………………………….. 50

Logistic Regression …………………………………………………………………………… 52

Chapter 5 Conclusions and Future Work …………………………………………………………… 57

Improvements to the Methodology ……………………………………………………… 60

References …………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 63

Appendix A  Survey ………………………………………………………………………………… 67

Appendix B  Survey Distribution Summary ………………………………………………… 71

Appendix C  Summary Statistics ……………………………………………………………….. 72

Chapter 1

 

Introduction

Park-and-ride facilities are parking lots that are typically owned and maintained by a regional transit agency that serve to provide potential transit users a means to more easily access transit by car instead of walking, bicycling or using other modes.  By allowing users to access transit via their personal vehicles, the effective catchment area of these facilities is much larger when compared to standard transit facilities, and this allows a larger portion of the population to access and use transit service.

Park-and-rides are becoming more popular as transit is an economical option for many commuters who have to travel longer distances.  However, park-and-rides by nature are capacity constrained, and overcrowding can be an issue, which causes access limitations.  Park-and-ride efficiency needs to be better understood to gain insight on how these facilities are used.  This will allow future implementations of park-and-ride facilities to be operated more efficiently and simultaneously address the needs of transit agencies and the transit-using public.  Park-and-ride efficiency (i.e., the number of people served by a single parking space in a park-and-ride) has not been well-studied and is likely an afterthought in many agencies; however, park-and-ride facilities are critical junctions in which a large portion of the commuting public changes modes from a personal vehicle to a more roadway congestion-friendly and environment-friendly form of public transit.  In many locations across the United States, park-and-ride facilities are either free to use or cost very little to the users.  Due to this fact, they are rarely profitable in their current state and, because of low or nonexistent fees to users, some undesirable behavior can occur.

It could be considered that the foremost purpose of a park-and-ride facility is to increase the number of people who can access transit, especially those who could not otherwise do so. In addition, a secondary purpose of park-and-ride facilities is the formation of carpools and vanpools, as they are often a convenient location for users to converge. This also gives each carpool user a reasonable commuting alternative via the adjacent public transit service in case of a missed carpool. In locations where park-andrides are underutilized (i.e., there are a surplus of empty parking spaces) the formation of carpools or vanpools is unlikely to affect the primary purpose of a park-and-ride and should be considered as a reasonable use of the additional parking spaces. However, in the case of overutilized park-and-rides (i.e., those that are capacity constrained), the users who wish to carpool or vanpool could be taking desirable parking spaces that would otherwise be occupied by transit users.  Deterring carpoolers and vanpoolers is difficult, as many park-and-rides have unrestricted access and no simple methods to bar them from forming at the facility. However, the implementation of a fee may cause carpoolers and vanpoolers to find alternative locations for gathering, as they would have to pay multiple fees as the primary carpool vehicle would need to enter the facility multiple times a day.

A very limited amount of research has been done on the preferences of park-andride users. The major limitation of the existing research on park-and-ride efficiency is that each individual study was very focused on specific goals and did not consider the multiple issues that could affect patron usage or facility operations. Many of these studies were narrow user-preference surveys, in which users were asked which features either

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improved the likelihood that they would use any given facility or which features would turn them away from using the facility. By proposing a wide variety of options and possible solutions simultaneously, a more accurate depiction of park-and-ride users’ true feelings toward pricing and other parking management strategies can be obtained.

Furthermore, little research has been done on the impacts of park-and-ride capacity on overall user and agency costs. The studies that have considered these costs were very case-specific, and the methods developed are not applicable to any other facilities that may be experiencing issues.

Research Objectives

The primary goals of this thesis are to develop a broader understanding of parkand-ride use, user reactions to potential pricing strategies and characteristics of individual facilities that might influence the impact if pricing strategies in the region.  The following objectives have been achieved in this thesis:

• Develop robust data collection methods to assess park-and-ride facility use,
• Create data filtering methods to adjust for limitations in the collected data,
• Determine general trends for various pricing strategies,
• Find statistical outliers of different pricing strategies and develop possible explanations, and
• Develop logistic regression models to gain deeper insight into users’ willingness to pay for park-and-ride facility access

 

Data collected from a research study done to assess many of these issues for a series of park-and-ride facilities in the Puget Sound region in Washington State was used to complete the objectives listed.  This region is currently experiencing overcrowding of many of their park-and-rides, with some facilities reaching capacity as early as 5:30 AM.

Different types of transit options were available at the park-and-ride facilities, including: single bus line, multiple bus line, and rail line. Each of these types of facilities required different data collection strategies, and different considerations in the analysis process. No facilities in the region currently employ any type of pricing restrictions, and the regional agencies that operate these facilities are currently in the process of implementing and assessing several pilot programs to determine what may be the best method of introducing a parking fee. The data collected provides a more complete understanding of how these park-and-ride facilities operate, and what the preferences of park-and-ride users are, which allows the above objectives to be completed.

INVESTIGATING USER REACTIONS TO PRICING STRATEGIES AT OVERCROWDED PARK AND RIDE FACILITIES

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