Cyclists Station Choice: Investigating railway station choice for cyclists including perceived social safety and comfort factors

Investigating station choice is important for possibly solving various capacity issues such as bicycle parking. Current literature is often restricted to dissatisfier parameters such as travel time, presence of transfer and travel costs. In order to fully understand station choice, this research includes factors regarding perceived safety and comfort, lighting at the station, shelter at the station and security in the bicycle parking, next to access travel time and bicycle parking costs. In this research, a choice experiment is carried out, and the retrieved data is analysed using a Multinominal Logit (MNL) model and a Latent Class(LC) model. The weights retrieved by the MNL model align with the assumptions that travel time and costs are most important for station choice. When applying an LC Model, two classes are found. One class (65%) is highly influenced by travel time and parking costs, which is equal to the MNL results. Males and students are very likely to belong in this class. Whereas the other class (35%) is also highly influenced by lighting and security in the bicycle parking and parking costs have a very low impact on the station choice for this class. Females and elderly (65+) are most likely to belong in this class. Thus for 35% of the population, satisfiers play a strong role in station choice. This leads to the conclusion that satisfiers play a role in station choice. The extent of influence by satisfiers on station choice is dependent on various socio-demographic characteristics.Transport, Infrastructure and Logistic