How Priorities of Men and Women for Choosing Railway Transportation Differ?: A Case Study

Abstract

For transportation in Iran, there are some peculiar conditions: very cheap fuel prices and very high road fatalities. In order to facilitate shifting to more sustainable modes, we extracted some of the major parameters that affected mode choice from the literature and made a self-developed questionnaire. It was distributed among bus and railway passengers until 400 full questionnaires were collected. In a set of Likert-scale questions, we asked them to rate the current status of the railway and in another set, how important they perceive different parameters for mode choice. We were particularly interested in investigating whether there is a meaningful statistical difference between the opinions of female and male respondents. The mean scores given to the Likert-scale questions were consistently higher for females than males; however, the order of major priorities was similar: 1-Safety, 2-Comfort, 3-Punctuality, 4- Speed, 5- Cost. Levene’s and T-test were used to test the hypotheses of equality of variance and means, respectively. The difference of means was statistically meaningful for cost, punctuality, safety, seeing the landscape and having an extensive choice for departure times but for speed and comfort, the null hypothesis of equality of means could not be rejected.