Accessibility evaluation: the effects of the Free Return System on choice behaviour for public libraries

In the field of public library study, travel costs incurred when returning books is an important issue for the spatial distribution of users, as well as the load necessary in the process of book borrowing. In recent years, the Free Return System, which is a subsystem of Library Services, has been developed so that users can return books to any library. In this paper, a model for describing the users' choice behaviour of facilities is constructed, and a method for evaluating travel costs accrued when travelling from home to facilities is proposed. The proposed model is applied to actual data of the choice behaviour of users of public libraries. The results of numerical analyses show that the Free Return System can reduce travel costs by 20% on average, and this value is equivalent to a growth of approximately 8% in the user base.