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Travel mode choice and transit route choice behavior in Montreal: insights from McGill University members commute patterns

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Abstract

In developed countries such as Canada and United States, a significant number of individuals depend on automobile as their main mode of transport. There has been a stronger push towards analyzing travel behavior at the individual level so that transportation agencies can formulate appropriate strategies to reduce the auto dependency. Towards this pursuit of enhancing our understanding on travel behavior, we examine individual home to work/school commute patterns in Montreal, Canada with an emphasis on the transit mode of travel. The overarching theme of this paper is to examine the effect of the performance of the public transportation system on commuter travel mode and transit route choice (for transit riders) in Montreal. We investigate two specific aspects of commute mode choice: (1) the factors that dissuade individuals from commuting by public transit and (2) the attributes that influence transit route choice decisions (for those individuals who commute by public transit). This study employs a unique survey conducted by researchers as part of the McGill University Sustainability project. The survey collected information on commute patterns of students, faculty and staff from McGill University. In addition, detailed socio-demographic and residential location information was also collected. The analysis was undertaken using multinomial logit model for the travel mode choice component and a mixed multinomial logit model for the transit route choice component. The model estimation results were employed to conduct policy sensitivity analysis that allows us to provide recommendations to public transportation and metropolitan agencies.

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Notes

  1. The response rate from our survey is ∼26 %. The rate falls within the acceptable response rates observed from earlier literature (see Kaplowitz et al., 2004; Manfreda et al., 2008).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the McGill Office of Sustainability and McGill Campus and Space Planning for their feedback and guidance at various stages of this project. We would also like to thank Daniel Schwartz, from IT Customer Services, for his assistance in developing the online survey and managing the distribution of the survey to the McGill Community. Thanks to Marianne Hatzopoulou, Jacob Mason, Cynthia Jacques, Kevin Manaugh for their help throughout the survey design process. Also we would like to thank Guillaume Barreau for modeling the transit trips to McGill in Google maps. Finally, we express our gratitude to the McGill Sustainability Projects Fund for providing funding for this project. The corresponding author would also like to acknowledge the financial support from Natural Sciences Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Discovery Grant. The authors would also like to acknowledge the feedback from two anonymous reviewers on an earlier version of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics, McGill University, Suite 483, 817 Sherbrooke St. W., Montréal, Québec, H3A 2K6, Canada

    Naveen Eluru & Vincent Chakour

  2. School of Urban Planning, McGill University, Suite 400, 815 Sherbrooke St. W., Montréal, Québec, H3A 2K6, Canada

    Ahmed M. El-Geneidy

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  1. Naveen Eluru
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  2. Vincent Chakour
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  3. Ahmed M. El-Geneidy
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Correspondence to Naveen Eluru.

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Eluru, N., Chakour, V. & El-Geneidy, A.M. Travel mode choice and transit route choice behavior in Montreal: insights from McGill University members commute patterns. Public Transp 4, 129–149 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12469-012-0056-2

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