Characteristics of Premium Transit Services that Affect Choice of Mode
Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP), Project H-37A

(PI: Maren Outwater, RSG Inc.)

The purpose of this research is to describe the most important factors that differentiate premium transit services from standard transit services, and to quantify for practical use the magnitude of these distinguishing features. A successful research effort will both improve the transit industry’s understanding of mode choice determinants and offer practical insights to the forecasting community so that mode choice models and transit path-builders can better represent and distinguish important mode characteristics.

Understanding and modeling the real drivers and factors determining travel behavior and eliminating “flat” constants-based model structures will significantly improve the explanatory power as well as potential transferability of travel models. This is a very ambitious and long-term task that includes numerous aspects of travel model improvement. TCRP H-37 identified the most important “breakthrough” directions with respect to mode choice model systems and consolidated the already acquired experience. TCRP H-37A will focus on transferability of the mode choice models, development of additional models to put the research into practice, and a demonstration that these models can be applied in practice.