Do commercial vehicles cruise for parking? Empirical evidence from Seattle

Parking cruising is a well-known phenomenon in passenger transportation, and a significant source of congestion and pollution in urban areas. While urban commercial vehicles are known to travel longer distances and to stop more frequently than passenger vehicles, little is known about their parking cruising behavior, nor how parking infrastructure affect such behavior. In this study we propose a simple method to quantitively explore the parking cruising behavior of commercial vehicle drivers in urban areas using widely available GPS data, and how urban transport infrastructure impacts parking cruising times. We apply the method to a sample of 2900 trips performed by a fleet of commercial vehicles, delivering and picking up parcels in Seattle downtown. We obtain an average estimated parking cruising time of 2.3 min per trip, contributing on average for 28 percent of total trip time. We also found that cruising for parking decreased as more curb-space was allocated to commercial vehicles load zones and paid parking and as more off-street parking areas were available at trip destinations, whereas it increased as more curb space was allocated to bus zone.