Abstract
Research of travel behaviors of university students is of theoretical and empirical importance. The literature, however, has paid little attention to mode choice of students at college towns. This study aims to specifically explore influence factors of the mode choice of college town students. After conducting a survey of commuter students at Iowa State University, a college-town university in the United States, the study uses both simple statistics and advanced statistical models (e.g., multinomial logit and nested logit models) to analyze the data and produces findings to confirm and test existing knowledge and to gain new insights. Firstly, students at a college town are more likely to adopt greener (non-driving-alone) modes, especially walking, to commute compared to their counterparts at urban universities; this is as revealed in the literature. Secondly, students may use “bundled services” to fulfill their travel needs. The students who prioritized rent affordability in housing choice tend to live in proximity to bus stops and are more likely to ride buses. Lastly, commuter students who do not drive alone to school tend to prefer a residence with transit proximity. Moreover, students who reside in proximity to transit and who reported “peer effects” would use non-driving modes more if commute time was shortened.
Highlights
In recent years, travel behaviors of university students have caught increasing attention among both researchers and policy makers [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]
Regarding the student mode choice, our preliminary analysis shows that 77% of the Iowa State University (ISU) students use non-driving-alone modes, which is much higher than the shares at urban universities, such as 27% at Ohio State University (OSU) [6], 66% at the University of Western Australia (UWA) [9], 42% at Old Dominion University (ODU), and 54% at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) [1]
To examine the impacts of different factors on mode choice and to control possible self-selection issues, we ran as many as six nested logit model (NLM) with different numbers of responses: (1) With all students that can feasibly drive, carpool, ride Cyride, walk and/or bike to the ISU
Summary
Travel behaviors of university students have caught increasing attention among both researchers and policy makers [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. Universities are often large trip attractors and, optimizing students’ travel behaviors may help reduce transportation-related infrastructure costs. Universities may set good examples for society with regard to promoting environmental awareness and encouraging good travel behaviors through education and other related measures [1,3,8]. Research on student travel behaviors in the setting of a college town has been inadequate. A college town is a jurisdiction where the university students account for a significant share (at least 10%) of the local population [15]
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