Public Transit Itinerary Choice Analysis Considering Various Incentives

Abstract

Previous research on public transport user preferences has primarily focused on mode choice, transfer penalties, and preferences related to service qualities. Individuals are generally found to not like waiting, transfers, or overcrowding. However, from an operation perspective, it could be important to convince users to change to a different itinerary to reduce overcrowding, which can cause problems such as bunching. This would most likely require convincing the user to voluntarily accept a longer wait or to take a different route potentially with a transfer. One means of doing so might be through incentives or offering a shared taxi. Incentivizing transit users to switch to a less-crowded itinerary, which could potentially be a way to manage bus overcrowding, is not well-studied. Through a discrete choice experiment, this study thus filled this research gap by testing people’s willingness to change routes or to take a shared taxi in exchange for one of three distinct types of incentives. A mixed binary logit model and a mixed nested logit model were used to investigate how different factors influence public transit user itinerary choice behavior. The results suggested that some people would be willing to change to the proposed alternative. Heterogeneity within the responses was seen as transit users were found to have distinct preferences for different incentives, and the value of the incentives influenced users differently. Our models and results could be helpful for public transit agencies to improve efficiency and reduce costs by better balancing the travel demand.