Research On The Commute Travel Mode Choice Behavior Of Residents In The Urban Rail Transit Corridor

Urban rail transit gradually becomes main skeleton of public transport system, while the large-scale construction and operation of rail transit impact the conventional bus system partly, and break the balance between original supply and demand of public transport system. Unreasonable competition on passengers between two modes affects the operating efficiency of entire system. In that case, it is necessary to consider the problem from the perspective of traffic demand to find the internal mechanism and space-time laws of the residents’ trip generation in urban rail transit corridor and discover the essence and evolutionary trend of the problem. This paper makes studies on the commute travel mode choice behavior of residents in urban rail transit corridor. Aiming at finding the commute travel laws and analyzing relationship between travel mode choice and rail transit corridor, this paper carried surveys and established models to grasp commute travel characteristics of residents, internal mechanism of travel mode choice and transfer behavior within public transport system, then to provide theoretical support for better discovering the competition and cooperation relationship between rail transit and conventional bus.Firstly, this paper summarized domestic and foreign scholars’ related researches to confirm the main research contents. On this basis, the concept of urban rail transit corridor and the definition of the influence scope of corridor were discussed. The overview of Suzhou rail transit corridor was introduced. The operating characteristics and combined pattern of different kinds of travel modes were compared. All these work provided basis for the research on residents travel mode choice behavior.Secondly, the behavior investigation of residents and public transport passengers in the corridor were carried out, and the survey content mainly involved personal and family information, influence factors of travel mode choice and travel behavior characteristics. According to the survey results, the time-space characteristics and mode choice characteristics of residents’ commute trip were analyzed, the differences between conventional bus passengers and rail transit passengers in the aspects of travel time, distance, price and transfer times were compared. Moreover, from the perspective of combined travel, this paper discussed the proportion and characteristics of feeder modes before and after the conventional bus and rail transit.Next, this paper deeply investigated the factors influencing residents’ commute travel mode choice, and the quantitative analysis was made from three aspects including personal and family attributes, travel attributes and psychological factors. Personal and family attributes mainly included gender, age, profession, personal monthly income and family elements. Travel attributes mainly included the travel distance, travel cost and travel space characteristics. For the psychological factors, this paper assumed that the behavior decision of individuals was controlled by individual consciousness. On the basis of the theory of planned behavior, the intention model of choosing public transport to commute to work for the residents in rail transit corridor was presented, the influence of public transport choice intention on people’s commute travel mode choice behavior was analyzed, and the differences between different travel mode users on their attitudes to public transport, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, behavioral habit and choice intention of public transport were discussed. On this basis, this paper established a nested logit model according to the service characteristics of different travel modes to quantificationally describe the influence of factors on residents’ commute travel mode choice probability.Finally, this paper took the combined travel inner public transport as an example, mainly discussed the transfer behavior among public transport. Treating the software TransCAD as development platform and GISDK as development tool, an untied network constituted of rail transit network, conventional bus network and pedestrian network was built to analyze public transport passengers’ travel path. According to the travel path, the index system of passenger flow of the parallel or feeder bus of rail transit, characteristics of travelers’ transfer travel were obtained, and the relationship between competition and cooperation of rail transit and conventional bus on the aspects of distribution rate of passenger flow and service volume in the corridor was discussed, to get the operating efficiency of public transport system.The research results can be used to find the internal mechanism of the residents’ commute travel mode choice and provide guide and reference to make and implement the traffic demand management policy in the rail transit corridor.