Model of Personal Attitudes towards Transit Service Quality

This article, from a special issue on the modeling and optimization of transportation systems, presents a multinomial logit model that can be used to measure personal attitudes towards transit service quality. The authors describe their investigation of reasons for using transit by residents of the City of Calgary, Canada and the development of the model from this investigation. Reasons for using transit are expressed as functions of people's perceptions and attitudes towards transit service quality and attributes. The approach models the reasons for choosing transit and tests the significance of two individual specific latent variables: perceptions of ‘reliability and convenience’ and ‘ride comfort’. The authors focus on the behavioral details that have policy implications. Their research found that the people of Calgary value ‘reliability and convenience’ over ‘ride comfort’. The authors conclude that improving the connectivity of train service, reducing multimodal transfers, and increasing dedicated right-of-ways for transit would effectively increase transit ridership in Calgary. In addition, the use of an intelligent transportation system (ITS) including transit signal priority, advance traveler’s information system (ATIS), and real-time information on bus arrival times would increase positive perceptions of the transit reliability and convenience.

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