Little’s Formula and Parking Behaviors

Abstract

Many local cities in Japan now are facing the critical problem of managing car parking to alleviate traffic congestion occurred chronically at weekends in their city center commercial area. The crucial point, we believe, to make matters worse for solving the problem is that planners at local cities seem to have no means to assess whether or not parking lots are insufficient and if so, how many parking lots they actually need. Taking up the actual instance of city center retail environment of Fukuoka City and conducting the interview survey of parking behaviors of consumers who visit there by automobile, the purpose of this paper is to address the problem to show a simple method to determine how much capacity the parking space must need at the city center by using Little’s formula with taking into account the distinctive feature of consumers’ parking behaviors at city center retail district.

This chapter is based on the paper, Saburo Saito, Kosuke Yamashiro, Masakuni Iwami, and Mamoru Imanishi [8], “Parking space policy for midtown commercial district and consumers’ parking and shop-around behaviors: Applying Little’s formula to the analysis of demand-supply balances for parking capacity in Tenjin area, the midtown of Fukuoka, Japan,” Fukuoka University Review of Economics, vol. 58, pp.75–98, 2014, which is modified for this chapter.