Beyond the main mode

Abstract

Access and egress trips constitute a substantial part of a train trip in minds of travellers, often being the deciding factor whether to travel by train at all. Despite a host of studies analysing individual legs within a multimodal trip chain, the full chain within a multimodal trip – including access, main and egress – has seen very limited attention. To understand the importance of all these choices, we use travel diaries from the Dutch Mobility Panel to estimate a nested logit discrete choice model. Our results suggest that for the main trip leg, train and bus/tram/metro (BTM) seem to be associated with an inherent disutility compared to walking, cycling or car. The in-vehicle time in train and BTM, however, seems to be perceived significantly less negatively (60% lower) than in private modes. This suggests that public transport modes are more attractive for longer journeys, as they involve a relatively high starting penalty, but a low marginal disutility of travel time. On both the access and egress legs, our results suggest a strong preference for walking, suggesting that train stations should be sufficiently densely located to allow most people to walk to a station. This, however, should not come at the expense of additional transfers, as they inflict substantial disutility. Operators need to find a balance between accessibility and directness. Given the strong dispreference of travelling by car to dense urban areas, these trips should be the primary target of policymakers and operators for attracting additional travellers to take the train. Future studies could further enhance our understanding of multimodal trips by including additional attributes in the data, account for respondent heterogeneity and study how individuals build their consideration set when making multimodal trips.