Research On Public Transit Mode Choice Considering Residential Self-Selection

The urban public transport system is becoming more sophisticated with the rapid expansion of rail transport.The low share of public transport and the increasing of the private car ownership result in some urban transport problems such as traffic congestion.So more detailed analysis of mode choice on urban public transport is required.Travel mode choice models usually treat transport supply and built environment as exogenous variables and ignore the endogenous effect of residential self-selection.These problems may lead to models mismatch and inaccurate conclusions,even affecting the development of public transit systems and the transport policies implementation.In this paper,I utilized control function approach and developed a multinomial Probit model to suppress the residential self-selection effect,by introducing the average house price per square meter as the instrumental variable.The empirical analysis was performed based on the household travel survey data from Suzhou in 2019.The paper also confirmed the existence of the residential self-selection effect and suggested that residential self-selection has different effects in different regions through sample control approach.Then,I also developed a nested logit model to analyze the different influences of the residential selfselection in different travel chains and the mutual influence relationship between travel chain modes and travel mode choices.This study finds that the residential self-selection effect affects the public transport mode choice of residents significantly.There are different effects on the travels with different purposes in different regions and travel chains.Endogeneity can be effectively depressed in the travel mode choice models by control function method.Residents living within approximately a 2 km radius from a metro station influenced by residential self-selection when they consider travel modes.The other residents do not consider metro as a daily travel mode when choosing where to live and their self-selection do not affect travel mode choice.The residential self-selection only affects travel behaviors in simple travel chains and has no influence on complex travel chains which have several destinations.Residents usually decide to choose their travel mode first and then determine their travel chain modes.The findings of this paper can analyze of the residents’ travel behaviors more accurately and clarify the mechanism of transit travel choice to provide a theoretical basis for transit policies.