What drives car use: Parking policy or perceived parking accessibility?

Evaluating the effectiveness of parking policies on travel decisions is crucial to reduce car use and improve transport sustainability. Existing research has primarily focused on the impact of parking policies using cross-sectional data, which is unable to assess the subjective and personal perceptions of parking accessibility and potential changes over time. This paper uses a K-means cluster analysis to identify heterogeneous groups and then constructs four Random-Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Models to analyse the associations between parking policy, perceived parking accessibility and car use based on longitudinal data from the Netherlands Mobility Panel (2014–2016). We identify three distinct groups of travellers: infrequent urban car users, functional car users, and dependent suburban car users. The results show that parking policy indirectly influences car use via perceived parking accessibility. The causal effects of parking policy on perceived parking accessibility are only significant among functional car users and dependent suburban car users, who have high levels of car ownership and car availability. Different causal effects have been found between perceived parking accessibility and car use among these three groups. For infrequent urban car users, a negative causal effect is found between perceived parking accessibility and car use. For functional car users, however, the causal effect of perceived parking accessibility on car use is significantly positive. For dependent suburban car users, the causal effect is positive but not significant. These findings are valuable for implementing differentiated parking policies and reducing car use among different population groups.