Residents’ Characteristics and Transport Policy Analysis in Large-Scale Residential Areas on a City Periphery

Big cities in China are reforming their old downtown areas and demolishing substandard housing. The government relocates residents to large-scale residential areas on the city periphery, where the residents often find transport service unsatisfactory. However, in the search for policies that could be applied to ease this problem, there were no studies supplying effective quantitative forecasts that assessed improvements in travel quality in such areas. To provide a policy scenario forecast that could measure travel quality, one that is also subject to the so-called transit priority strategy, this study takes the case of Jinhexincheng, Shanghai, China, analyzes its residents’ characteristics, estimates a mode choice mixed logit model, and applies the model to six policy scenario forecasts. Consumer surplus is calculated as the travel quality metric; mode shares are calculated as the transit priority metric. Results show that central city migrants and the others are similar in gender, education, years living locally, and transportation-related decisions, despite their different motives for moving to the area. People are different in age, in whether they have Shanghai permanent residency, in apartment ownership, and in years living in Shanghai. In all possible mode choice logit models, there is no sign of different mode preferences; so in the policy scenario forecasts, they are considered the same. Of all six sets of possible policy scenarios, building retail closer has the highest consumer surplus increase—thus, it improves travel quality the most. Meanwhile, it also has an acceptable transit share. This means the scenario is not against transit priority. In future planning, this policy should be the first considered.