Study On The Evening Travel Decision Of Urban Residents

Continuously development of cities and improving living standard initiate more and more leisure travel demands after daytime working, which leads to an outstanding increase of evening travel, and causes unignorable traffic jam and traffic safety problems. In order to solve the problems and make proper traffic improving policies, decision-making procedure of evening travel should be considered from the view of traffic demanding management. For travelers, evening travel has much subjectivity and freedom than daytime travel, and the decision is closer to their demands and realities, so this paper starts from personalities and judgements to vehicles and destinations, divides travel decision into vehicle choice and destination choice, and makes research about influence factors of urban residents’ evening travel.Firstly, this paper reviews domestic and foreign research about travel decision and evening travel, summarizes existing subject investigated and study method. Makes it clear that traveling is an organic combination of physical and psychological process, which to meet the specific demands of individual. And the basic theories of travel behavior analysis are introduced, travel modes are classified and compared according to different travel standards. The travel decision formation process is explained, also it is confirmed that investigation of travel decision should be based on survey of travelers’ psychological factors.On the basis of above theories,decision tree(DT) is used to make cluster analysis on differences of travel decisions, and structural equation model(SEM) is used to generate decision model including personalities, traffic information sensibility, and subjective judgement on latent variables(fitness, convenience, safety, destination, objective condition). The evening travel decision making progress, “personalities-subjective judgement-travel decision” is supposed and progressively validated. This model is able to tell the complete process of evening travel decision formation and influencing parameter of variables. The decision tree reveals that decisions on travel method distribute as the order “whether owns a private automobile”-“traveling convenience priority”-“personal living condition”, and it becomes “living condition”-“traveling convenience priority”-“gender” while “whether owns a private automobile” is deleted. Difference in destination preference is decided by judgements of the destinations, and by numbers of people living together while the former is deleted. Result of SEM shows that residents make decision of destination on the basis of decision of travel method. Traffic information sensibility and personalities directly affect judgements on fitness and objective conditions, and convenience, safety and destination judgement have direct effect to traffic method and destination decisions.At last, improvement policies are presented accordingly to solve the mentioned traffic problems. Also defects and prospective research direction are summarized.