Modelling Travellers’ Behaviour At Transportation Terminal

Out-of-vehicle times tend to be perceived as being more burdensome than in-vehicle time by transit users when making transfers. Empirical evidence has shown that a large portion of public transport journeys involves at least one transfer and this experience affects travelers’ satisfaction with public transport service. Increase in trip chaining complexity has been identified as a barrier to the use of public transport. Due to the dispersed nature of origins and destinations, public transport operators are unable to provide direct connections for all origin-destinations pairs. Given the importance of out-vehicle times on travel choices, intermodal connectivity at transfer facilities is a critical part of the overall transportation network effectiveness. Despite their importance, transfers have been long overlooked by decision-makers, transport planners, and analysts. This is due to 1) not enough attention has been given to the effects of out-of-vehicle travel on ridership,2) it is difficult to comprehensively analyse transfer facilities using uniform criteria due to a large variation in size, modes served, location, and amenities of transfer facilities and 3) analysis methods are too primitive.This study has two main objectives. The first objective is to analyse the various elements of transfer that matter most to passengers. The second objective is to determine the influence of out-of-vehicle provisions offered by public transit operators, on transit users’ perception of trip attributes related to transfers. A user stated preference survey was conducted at Dalian high speed rail and the data was modelled using discrete choice modelling. The study evaluated different transfer experience and its associated components (e.g transfer walking and waiting times) and physical characteristics. The trip component heavily penalised were waiting time at the station and the lift. Transfer facilities that integrate various transportation modes in one location encourage people to use public transport by reducing the burdens of transfers.