Research On Passengers' Travel Behavior Influenced By High-speed Rail

Railway transportation plays a critical role in China's passenger transport market.Motivated by the development of technology,high-speed railway(HSR)in China develops rapidly.With the advantage of high speed,large capacity and high efficiency,HSR promotes profound changes in China's transport patterns and passenger markets.HSR generates considerable impact on the economy and society as well as human's travel behavior.In this context,millions of passengers' trip records are used to examine the influence of HSR on people's travel behavior.Specifically,four work as following is did.Firstly,we create panel data based on individual trip records and inferred the causality of HSR and passengers' travel behavior using the difference-in-difference(DID)model.The entry of HSR service for different cities is not concurrent,which provides us an opportunity to conduct a quasi-natural experiment analysis.We examine the difference of travel behavior between experimental group and control group and obtaine the unbiased estimation of the HSR's influence on passengers' travel behavior by using DID model.Then we conduct an empirical study on how HSR affects bus passenger transport to examine whether the entry of HSR service significantly influences highway bus transportation.Secondly,the paper studies passengers' travel behavior of the Chengyu HSR based on ticket data.By investigating thousands of individual trip records from the special passenger transport market,we present travellers' age distribution and people's preference for different channels of train ticket purchasing.Then,we analyze power-law phenomenon in the operation of Chengyu HSR and find the important value of heavy user of HSR service.In this part,we mainly explored the impact of HSR station's accessibility on people's travel frequency and conclued that the accessibility of HSR station positively affects people's travel frequency.Thirdly,we explore the impact of HSR on the operation of existing railway lines.Taking the three railway lines in Chengdu-Chongqing economic zone,we firstly studies how Chengyu HSR affects temporal and spatial distribution of passenger in existing railway lines including the Old Chengyu and the Chengsuiyu railway railway line.Then,we investigate people's switching behavior on individual level and conclude that the rich prefer to switch to HSR.Most importantly,we investigated individuals' choice behavior for intercity travel based on a large ticket dataset in this sectin.We construct various independent variables by using passengers' trip records,including travel distance,socio-demographics,ticket purchasing methods,social status,train frequency,train date and train time,trip purpose and distance to railway stations,and then develop a binary logit model to quantify the influence of these variables on individuals' choice behavior.The results show that all the variables impose significant effects on individuals' behavior and the choice model can successfully predict people's behaviour.Finally,leveraging the sales data from Chengdu-Chongqing railway,we investigate the effect of group travel on the choice of railway products and services.Based on Heckman's two-stage model with controlling for more than 1.3 million passenger fixed effects,our results show that travel with companions will enhance the possibility of choosing high-speed trains and premium seats.Further,such an effect is moderated by gender and age.Specifically,when travelling with female passengers and the elderly,one is more likely to choose high-speed trains and premium seats.These findings not only provide new insights into the railway management,but also suggest a general desire of human being for high-quality life and consumption upgrade beneath the group-based behaviors.