MODE CHOICE BEHAVIOR FOR GROUND ACCESS TO AIRPORTS: A CASE OF ISTANBUL ATATÜRK INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT (IST) AND SABIHA GOKCEN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT (SAW)

Abstract

Accessing airports has been a problem for passengers due to traffic congestion in cities. Thus, in order to catch the flights on time, passengers consider many factors to choose the transportation mode for airport access. Some of the factors are covariates, and they can be listed as age of the passenger, number of luggage carried, travel cost and travel time to the airport, group size of the passengers, and reliability of access modes. These covariates, may differ for each airport; and hence, in this paper, we investigated the differences of these covariates between Istanbul Ataturk International Airport (IST) and Istanbul Sabiha Gokcen International Airport (SAW). Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and post-hoc tests were conducted to investigate the covariates that affect the mode choice to access IST and SAW. The results indicated that these two airports have differences in terms of the effect of these selected six covariates on airport access mode choice. Reliability of the modes, travel time, travel cost, age of the passenger and traveling group size affected the mode choice to access IST. On the other hand, only reliability of the modes, travel time and travel cost had effects on airport access mode choice for SAW. Based on the analysis, some recommendations for the decision makers were also provided.