Parking preferences of tourists in Sun Moon Lake scenic area

Sun Moon Lake is a famous tourist attraction in Taiwan and around the world. However, as Sun Moon Lake is surrounded by mountains and has limited land to develop, traffic congestion around the lake area is commonplace during peak holiday hours. This study focuses on the parking choices of visitors to Sun Moon Lake and develops a stated preference (SP) instrument with multiple scenarios to evaluate parking preferences under various financial and service level scenarios. We estimate Multinomial Logit (MNL) and Mixed Logit (ML) models, accounting for the panel nature of the data (PDML)to identify preferences for parking choices of visitors to Sun Moon Lake. The focus is on understanding how parking price, travel time, walking time, scenery, and transfers between public transport affect visitors’ parking choices. Unlike the findings of studies in metropolitan areas, which often find that parking price was the deciding factor, visitors’ parking decisions in the tourist area were more concerned with time factors, such as the time to search for places to park and traffic congestion, possibly due to the less frequent use of tourist venues. Although raising parking price can suppress parking demand in the scenic area, other parking management mechanisms work better, such as the construction of new and suitable outer parking lots with transfer buses to relieve the heavily congested traffic in the scenic area. In addition, we find that using the parking space in the area can be improved by beautifying the landscaping between the parking lots and the tourist spots, enhancing the pleasure of traveling along the routes, introducing multiple transfer modes, and providing real-time traffic information to tourists.