LONG DISTANCE TRAVEL PATTERNS IN INSTITUTIONAL AREAS

Abstract

Transportation professionals face challenges of increasing complexity to meet the goals of providing safe, efficient, reliable, and environment friendly transportation. To evaluate the performance of transportation networks a study can be done that's include certain quarries like what people do over space, and how people use transport to move over space between two distance places. Requirement of additional facilities to be added to existing network and what decision a person takes under choices and why, this study is called as travel patterns. It's plays a pivotal role in transportation planning. This study is an attempt to understand the Long distance travel patterns in institutional areas. IIT Roorkee and IIT Delhi were selected as the study area for this work. The study locations were identified based on availability of transportation network and facility provided by the network with respect to location to examine the effect of the location and the socioeconomic status of the respondents upon travel patterns and intercity mode choices. Questionnaire was prepared on the collection of intercity travel information. The information is collected in parts, for main travel, supporting travel, transfers, and travelers' perceptions towards travel attributes and for personal and household characteristics of the respondents. The sample size was 380 and 408 for IIT Roorkee and IIT Delhi respectively. Data were analyzed in two stages. Sample characteristics like personal and household characteristics are discussed in first stage analysis, whereas, travel characteristic and perception based analysis are discussed in second stage. Travel burden faced at the two locations and travel patterns of different socioeconomic groups residing in the institutes are also examined. In inter-city travel, train and bus are the major travel modes. Their relative importance changes with respect to travel distance. Bus is dominant within 100 km and train in above 500 km. In between, both plays a major mode role. Personal and hired modes have substantial share up to 250 km, and air travel has substantial share above 500 km. Improvement in overall system at both places would reduce extra travel. Better air connectivity would reduce around 25% bus trips and 10% car-taxi trips and better bus services would result in 3% less car-taxi trips. If the travel cost is born by somebody else other than traveler, than the traveler tries to increase travel comfort by option for hired car-taxi in most of the travel distance, it is achieved by using air travel at much higher rate. On the whole, the travel burden within 500 km distance is reduced to the minimum. But this result in high expenditure on travel.