A Joint Modeling Analysis of Passengers’ Intercity Travel Destination and Mode Choices in Yangtze River Delta Megaregion of China

Abstract

Joint destination-mode travel choice models are developed for intercity long-distance travel among sixteen cities in Yangtze River Delta Megaregion of China. The model is developed for all the trips in the sample and also by two different trip purposes, work-related business and personal business trips, to accommodate different time values and attraction factors. A nested logit modeling framework is applied to model trip destination and mode choices in two different levels, where the lower level is a mode choice model and the upper level is a destination choice model. The utility values from various travel modes in the lower level are summarized into a composite utility, which is then specified into the destination choice model as an intercity impedance factor. The model is then applied to predict the change in passenger number from Shanghai to Yangzhou between scenarios with and without high-speed rail service to demonstrate the applicability. It is helpful for understanding and modeling megaregional travel destination and mode choice behaviors in the context of developing country.

On the development of a semi-nonparametric generalized multinomial logit model for travel-related choices

“…First, it may be challenging to directly apply the proposed method to model choice behaviors in the context of a large choice set (e.g. [ 41 ]). The likelihood function, depicted in Eq ( 18 ), involves multiple levels of summations and the number of levels is dependent on the number of alternatives in the choice set.…”

Untitled

“…Trip studies in this case include the study of the purpose for making trips, origin and destination of the trips within the city, frequency of making trips, the economy of making trips and finally the available transport modes in the city [4]. The study area, Ado-Ekiti, is divided into traffic zones for which trip attractions and productions are estimated.…”