Modeling the Timing of User Responses to a New Urban Public Transport Service

When a new service is introduced into the transport market (or an existing service is modified), the timing and nature of the responses of individuals can be expected to vary considerably. The aggregated responses of individuals will determine overall usage of the service. This paper reports how a panel survey was used to obtain information on the timing and nature of responses to a new public transport service. The survey results indicate how awareness, perceptions, and usage of the service change over time. Duration modeling was applied to analyze the factors that influenced the time taken to use the new service. It indicates that being younger, being from a household without a car, gaining a bus service that is physically closer to the home than services previously available, and using buses frequently before the new service was introduced all reduce the time taken to use the new service. The duration modeling provides useful results for operators to consider in marketing new transport services. For forecasting the overall usage of a new service, predicting new users and their frequency of usage need to be considered. It is anticipated that this type of analysis will lead to better understanding of the impacts of transport policy interventions and to improved transport forecasting tools.

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