Estimating suburban preferences for integrated public transit and ridesourcing services through a revealed-preference/stated-preference survey

Abstract

Low-density areas like suburbs can be challenging to serve with fixed-route transit. Demand responsive transit has been used to service these areas with mixed results, but suburban travellers may respond to ridesourcing integrated with transit more positively because of the improved booking and dispatching interface offered by ridesourcing. This paper explores how suburban residents perceive transit-integrated ridesourcing, both for cost and time attributes of the system and in comparison to other travel modes in the area (cycling, auto, taxi or Uber, and transit). A Hierarchical Bayes mixed logit model was estimated using the results of a revealed-preference/stated-preference survey, revealing that transit-integrated ridesourcing had similar preferences to fixed-route transit. Across time and cost variables, respondents were more sensitive to walk time, transfer time, the number of transfers, parking cost, and taxi or Uber fare, and were minimally impacted by changes in the IVTT deviation of their trip times. The change in utility for the length of transit or transit-integrated ridesourcing in-vehicle travel time versus auto in-vehicle travel time was found to have a strongly linear relationship, while other attributes exhibited non-linearity to different degrees, particularly walk time, transfer time, transit-integrated ridesourcing fare, and taxi or Uber fare. Respondents who were female, younger, taking home-based school trips, or had lower household incomes were more open to transit-integrated ridesourcing and transit than other demographic groups. The likelihood of taking each of the five travel modes was assessed after COVID-19, finding generally minimal to negative impact for transit-integrated ridesourcing. Insights into vehicle and transit pass ownership, existing travel alternatives, and a prior transit-integrated ridesourcing pilot in the area are presented.