Airport and Station Accessibility as Determinant of Mode Choice

The dissertation, on which this paper is based, examines whether the positive experience with High Speed Rail (HSR) in Europe and Japan is likely to be transferable to North America without significant modifications. It studies how important the access advantage was to the success of the Japanese system. Almost 50 000 air and rail observations of the 1995 Intercity Travel Survey could be used to estimate separate airport pair and HSR station pair choice models. The HSR choice set consisted of 1 260 station pairs and had to be randomized. Weights compensate for heteroskedasticity and extend the sample to a typical Fall day with daily expansion factors. A utility impact analysis revealed that access and egress related variables account for 26 - 43% of the total absolute utility of typical air and rail travel. Terminal fixed effects were found to be about four times more important for HSR than for air. They capture not only accessibility attributes, but also the attractiveness of the terminal's location. If the utility of HSR travel in the United States would depend on the magnetism of large downtown stations as much as it appears to in Japan, innovative solutions must be found to replicate this effect. They would require a paradigm shift to convergence, seeing urban, regional, and high speed ground transportation as one coherent system. The small air and large HSR coefficients estimated with nested logit suggested that a new airport would mostly draw passengers away from other airport pairs, while adding HSR stations would have a high impact on other modes.

• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Clever, Reinhard
  • Hansen, Mark
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 86th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2007-1-21 to 2007-1-25
• Date: 2007

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: CD-ROM
• Features: Figures; Tables;
• Pagination: 16p
• Monograph Title: TRB 86th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers CD-ROM

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Air travel; Airport operations; Airports; High speed ground transportation; High speed rail; Intercity transportation; Light rail transit; Mode choice; Public transit; Rail transit stations; Travel surveys
• Uncontrolled Terms: Intercity passenger rail
• Geographic Terms: Europe; Japan
• Subject Areas: Aviation; Operations and Traffic Management; Passenger Transportation; Public Transportation; Railroads; Terminals and Facilities;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01049303
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 07-0476
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Feb 8 2007 5:03PM