MODELING MODE CHOICES FOR INTER-CITY TRAVEL

Abstract

Intercity travel demand analysis aims at relating intercity travel to the socioeconomic characteristics of the travellers and the technical and level-of-service characteristics of the transportation system. In India, there has been a steep uptrend in the growth of intercity travel and this has created an urgent need for the development of better transport infrastructure. Given the significant investment needed for such infrastructure, the development of these facilities should be based on a systematic analysis of the future demand for travel, so that the facility developed is viable both on technical and economic grounds. The long-haul intercity travel demand, in most countries, is met by rail and air transport modes. In India, in recent past, the demand for domestic air travel has registered a high rate of growth. This has been facilitated by the entry of several operators into the Indian domestic airline market, which has resulted in competitive market condition leading to frequent reduction of air fare by the competitive airline with the ultimate objective of attracting passengers from other airlines as well as the upper class train passengers. The present study is concerned with the development of mode choice model for intercity travel in India. For the purpose of modeling, the resident of IIT Roorkee and IIT Delhi were considered for the study. The intercity travel data along with socioeconomic information for both the institutes were available for developing the model. Data was analyzed to bring out the variation in the characteristics of households with respect to the household income, demographics and size and vehicle ownership; personal characteristics like gender, age of respondent, monthly income, education status etc; and travel information like usage of travel mode by travel distances and purpose, travel time and cost, monthly expenditure on transportation, use of different services provided by modes etc. The modes used for intercity travel were air, train, bus, taxi, car, two wheeler. Air mode was mainly used for distances 111 more than 1000 km by the faculty group and higher income group. The logit models were developed based on different distance band, purposes, different socioeconomic groups' etc. It was observed that the goodness of fit statistics for the models developed were high. Different variables were found becoming significant with the change in travel distance bands, purposes, socioeconomic groups. All these models were calibrated using ALOGIT software and the validation was done for all types of model.