Modeling of Motorcycle Ownership and Commuter Usage: A UK Study

This paper presents work, undertaken for the UK Department for Transport, to help determine how policy could affect motorcycle usage. There are two important choices that determine potential motorcycle use: the decision to own a motorcycle and, contingent on that, the decision to use a motorcycle for a particular trip. This research has addressed both of these, and this paper describes the development of models that represent these decision processes. The motorcycle ownership model predicts the number of motorcycles that a person owns and the engine sizes of these motorcycles, depending on the characteristics of the person and the average purchase cost. The structure of the ownership model is a disaggregate nested logit model, with structural parameters used to measure the sensitivity of the choice of engine size relative to motorcycle ownership. Existing travel surveys contained insufficient information with which to model the mode choice decisions of motorcycle owners. Therefore, new surveys that incorporated stated preference discrete choice experiments were designed. This also allowed the collection of data to examine how motorcycle usage may change as a result of policy and the impacts of other important influences, such as weather. The data were used to develop nested logit models of mode choice. These models also give some insight into how the ability to interlane filter influences mode choice. This is the first study from the United Kingdom that models both motorcycle ownership and mode choice. It provides useful insights for policy makers and illustrates the potential for the modeling of motorcycles within the same framework used other transport modes.