2023 Volume 79 Issue 11 Article ID: 22-00347
The facilities which serve as local hubs and are attractive enough to be visited as destinations are expected to be assessed from various perspectives. In this study, we propose a method to evaluate the value of facilities themselves, by estimating their utility values to generate visits and their consumer surplus based on the travel cost spent to visit them. At the same time, the proposed method classifies visitors into segments with common utility values, taking into account the heterogeneity of visitors' preferences. We applied the method to visitor data to roadside stations in Ibaraki Prefecture, which were derived from ETC2.0 data. It is found that some roadside stations have a large value despite the small number of visits, and that some functions contribute to improving the attractiveness of the roadside stations. Our method is a novel travel cost method that can take into account the competition with alternative facilities by means of the inverse shortest paths problem model.
