Behavioral Response to Transit Demand Management Promotions: Sustainability and Implications for Optimal Promotion Design

Increasing ridership in metro systems is outpacing its capacity. Promotion based transit demand management can help agencies better manage the available system capacity when the opportunity and investment to expand are limited. While several studies address short-term behavioral response to such promotions using before and after analysis, how behavioral changes are maintained in the long run is also very important. Using an extensive automated dataset over two years from the Hong Kong Metro system, this paper explores the longitudinal behavior of passengers in response to a promotion to shift their travel time to the pre-peak period. The approach uses customer segmentation to evaluate the response of different groups. The results highlight the heterogenous response of different groups. Users with high schedule flexibility, less variable itineraries of a trip and relatively long distances are more likely to shift their travel times. The longitudinal promotion analysis reveals that 35-40% of passengers who initially shifted will eventually revert to their previous travel time periods. Based on the results of the analysis, an ‘optimal’ promotion design approach is applied to examine the effectiveness of promotion strategies given different response assumptions, and constraints on budget and performance requirements. The promotion design using group-specific response can better target price-sensitive users, hence improves its effectiveness, while the design based on the long-term response shows a significant performance decrease.

  • Supplemental Notes:
    • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP030 Standing Committee on Public Transportation Marketing and Fare Policy.
  • Corporate Authors:

    Transportation Research Board

    ,    
  • Authors:
    • Ma, Zhenliang
    • Basu, Abhishek Arunasis
    • Liu, Tianyou
    • Koutsopoulos, Haris N
  • Conference:
  • Date: 2019

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Figures; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 5p

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01698004
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: 19-05266
  • Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
  • Created Date: Mar 1 2019 3:51PM