Choosing Public Transport—Incorporating Richer Behavioural Elements in Modal Choice Models

Abstract

The development of behaviourally richer representations of the role of well-established and increasingly important influences on modal choice, such as trip time reliability and accounting for risk attitude and process rules, has moved forward at a fast pace in the context of automobile travel. In the public transport setting, such contributions have, with rare exception, not been considered. In this paper, we discuss and empirically illustrate the merits of advanced modelling developments aimed at improving our understanding of public transport choice, namely the inclusion of reliability in extended expected utility theoretic forms, to recognize risk attitude and perceptual conditioning, the consideration of passenger crowding and its inclusion in linear additive models, and the role of multiple heuristics in representing attribute processing as a way of conditioning modal choice. We illustrate the mechanics of introducing these behaviourally appealing extensions using a modal choice data set collected in Sydney.