An Economic Evaluation Of A New Alternative Public Transport Mode

Xiamen was among the fastest growing metropolitan cities during the past five years.This rapid urbanization led to an increased number of registered motor vehicles,which has posed challenges for the city's traffic conditions and the environment.To reduce traffic congestion and air pollution,the City authority has planned a new Metro public transport service.The purpose of this study is to do an economic analysis of(Xiamen Metro),the new alternative public transport mode.As in most of the transportation mode evaluation studies,the present study used the stated preference discrete choice modeling.A hypothetical scenario of a 20Km(work/study trip)was defined along with its proper attributes and their corresponding levels.Then,a proven orthogonal fractional factorial statistical design was used to build the alternatives or choices presented to the respondents in the survey.Basically,in all scenarios,the respondents(commuters)were asked to choose one out of three given choices,with each choice representing one of the three transport modes:Bus,Metro,and Car.Using the multinomial logit model estimation method,the three utility functions,or satisfaction to the commuters form his/her choices of different transport modes were estimated.The marginal effect(VTTS-value of travel-time saving)or(VOT value of time)for the trip attributes was estimated and a welfare study of the metro transport mode was conducted through the calculation of compensating variation.Our Findings showed that the city commuters reacted very positively to the introduction of the new alternative transport mode(Xiamen metro)and this was clearly shown in the 65%market share for the metro,as well as the benefit to the social welfare given by the 2.28 RMB individual's willingness to pay.