Abstract
Understanding the public transportation users’ preferences to long-distance travel modes would contribute to reasonable developing policies and resource allocation. This paper aims to explore the influencing mechanism of potential factors on the long-distance travel mode choice. A survey was conducted to collect the data. The analysis of variance (ANOVA) approach was applied to analyze the correlation relationship between potential factors and travel mode choice behavior. The results showed that, except gender, service demand for safety and departure time, all of the other factors significantly influenced the travel mode choice behavior. Specifically, passengers with higher education level and income level were more likely to choose high-speed railway (HSR) and plane; passengers caring about travel expense were more likely to choose ordinary train, whereas plane and HSR may be chosen more by passengers caring more about comfort, punctuality and efficiency; the more passengers were satisfied with travel modes’ service performance, the more they would be likely to choose them; the most competitive distance ranges for coach, ordinary train, HSR and plane were below 500 km, 500–1000 km, 500–1500 km and over 1500 km, respectively. Besides, the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique was applied to investigate the influencing mechanism of factors on the long-distance travel mode choice. The results revealed that travel distance was the most significant variable directly influencing passengers’ mode choices, followed by the service demand, performance evaluation, and personal attributes. Furthermore, personal attributes were verified to have an indirect effect on travel mode choice behavior by significantly affecting the service demand and performance evaluation.
Highlights
During the past two decades, China has been in a period of rapid urban development, with the rate of development increasing from 26.94% to 57.35% between 1991 and 2016 [1]
The results showed that the indirect effect (0.27) of personal attributes was higher than direct effect (0.16), which meant that the two mediating variables played a necessary role in the influence of personal attributes on the travel mode choice [43,49]
China has entered a period of rapid development of high-speed rail (HSR), which brings an intense competition to the other long-distance travel modes
Summary
During the past two decades, China has been in a period of rapid urban development, with the rate of development increasing from 26.94% to 57.35% between 1991 and 2016 [1]. With the trend of rapid urbanization, China has seen a sharp growth in its long-distance multimode transportation system, including airlines, railways, and highways. The annual increases of the modes’ mileages are 13.3% for airways, 4.5% for railway and 3.2% for highways. The most impressive achievement is the establishment of high-speed rail (HSR) system which is acknowledged widely as low-energy, high-capacity and high-efficiency. As of 2016, China had the world’s longest HSR network, with about 22,000 km in service [1]. There are plans to increase the HSR network to 30,000 km by 2020, based on a network of four vertical and four horizontal trunk lines
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