The paper presents new findings on the influence of multi-modal trip attributes on the quality and competitiveness of regional multi-modal train alternatives. The analysis covers the entire trip from origin to destination, including access and egress legs to and from the train network. The focus is on preferences for different feeder modes, station types and train service types as well as on the relative influence of time elements and transfer penalties. Data from dedicated surveys are used including individual objective choice sets of 235 multimodal homebound trips in which train is the main transport mode. Hierarchical Nested Logit (HNL) models are estimated to take account of unobserved similarities between alternatives at the home end and the activity end of the trip respectively, resulting in two-level nesting structures which differentiate between intercity (IC) and nonintercity railway station types at the upper level and between transit and private access modes at the lower level. In order to reflect the multi-dimensional structure of the data a more advanced so-called Multi-Nested GEV model according to the Principles of Differentiation (PD) has been estimated which significantly improves the explanatory power and stresses the importance of the home side of the multi-modal trip. (Author/publisher)
Abstract