Urban Travel Characteristics of the Elderly and Handicapped People in a Subsidized Taxi Program

123 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1980.In recent years, public transit officials of most cities in the United States have made increasing attempts to provide special services to elderly and handicapped people who cannot use conventional public transportation modes. Some form of subsidized taxi program is one type of these special services. In order to provide adequate consideration and planning for this kind of public transportation, the travel characteristics of this group of riders and the factors that affect their trips have to be identified and studied together with the development of a trip model of these people. Little research has been done in this field, particularly research directed toward developing the trip model of elderly and handicapped riders.The purpose of this research was to study the trip characteristics of elderly and handicapped riders and to identify the factors that have an influence of their trips. Then a trip model of this group of people in a subsidized taxi program was developed. The data base for this research was collected from the Champaign-Urbana (Illinois) Mass Transit District's (CUMTD) half-fare program.The research includes two main parts of analysis. The first is the descriptive analysis which involves the study of the travel characteristics and trip factors.The second part of the research is the quantitative analysis which involves two categories of analysis methods: the probability distribution method; and the surface fitting method. These two analysis categories which included several techniques of analysis were used to develop trip models for the elderly and handicapped persons who used the subsidized taxi service.The results of model development showed that the trip generation analysis which was based on multiple regression technique could provide a trip model for this group of people. This trip generation model included the transformed factors of age and fare as independent variable together with the transformed factor of number of trips as a dependent variable.The application of the trip generation model and the assumptions for this model are also demonstrated in an example.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD