Study of Users Travel Approaches in Transit Stop Choice Modelling

This research aims to study the use of travel approaches in transit users’ access stop choice behavior. For this purpose, discrete choice models are developed with nested logit structure where users travel approaches are placed in the upper level (nest) and the associated stops are modelled as children of each nest. Stop choice attributes includes: facility attributes, path attributes associated with each stops, correction factors to address the correlation between the paths and users socio-economic factors. The data used in this research was taken from the household travel survey (HTS) of 2009 in Southeast Queensland (SEQ), Australia.This study proves that the transit users use travel approaches like minimize travel time, minimize access time and minimize number of transfer to choose their access stop. They even use dual approaches for access stop choice. It further shows that path attributes along with some stop attributes affect the decision making. The path attributes like walking time in the path, transfers, travel time etc. and stop attributes like walking time to access, number of routes, presence of lighting, number of maps show significant effects on transit stop choice. The results also show that the walking time needed to access the preferred stop is valued very highly than the travel time or walking time in the path. Users seem to prefer choosing stops that have more direct route (minimum transfer) and/or more route option to reach the destination