Attitudinal and Emotional Travel

Transportation research has traditionally explained an individual’s travel behavior as a conscious, utility-maximizing choice derived from the functional characteristics of different travel options and the access to opportunities that they provide.

At JTL, we integrate insights from social psychology into the study of travel behavior. In doing so, we are able to consider how attitudes and emotions might also motivate travel behavior. For example, we measure how an individual’s environmental consciousness relates to their mode choice. We have analyzed how “car pride”—the attribution of social status and personal image to using cars—relates to transportation mode choice. We have examined how feelings of anxiety felt by riders waiting for buses, and feelings of nervousness or excitement when riding autonomous vehicles, are shaped by information provision and environmental contexts. And we have compared these psychological motivations for travel behavior across people and places, understanding the role of context in shaping attitudes and their relationship to behavior.

At JTL, we contend that attitudinal and emotional motivations have substantive impact on how we understand travel. These same motivations could play an important role in impacting how we change behavior through creative technological approaches and new policy instruments.

  • Impacts of subjective evaluations and inertia from use of existing travel modes on adoption of autonomous mobility-on-demand

    Transportation Research Part C
    (
    2021
    )

    As autonomous vehicle (AV) technology advances, it is important to understand its potential demand and user characteristics. Literature from stated preference surveys find that attitudes and current travel behavior are as or more important than demographics in determining intention to purchase or use AVs. Yet to date no study has looked at how attitudes and use of existing modes both simultaneously affect AV adoption. In this study, we conduct a stated preference survey in Singapore to investigate how the subjective evaluation of existing travel modes (attitudes) and inertia based on previous use of existing modes affect the adoption of an autonomous mobility-on-demand service (AMOD). Using a sample size of 2,003 individuals and 11,613 choice observations, we estimate a mixed logit discrete choice model incorporating latent variables capturing subjective evaluations of existing travel modes (determined through confirmatory factor analysis), a two-part formulation of modal inertia, and other trip-specific and socio-demographic variables. Results show that subjective evaluation and use of existing modes both affect the adoption of AMOD. Specifically, people with a positive evaluation of ridehailing and those who are current ridehailing users are more likely to choose AMOD. Additionally, those who are current car drivers are more likely to choose AMOD, while users of public transit were less likely to choose AMOD. Given that ridehailing is the closest existing mode to our hypothetical AMOD service, our results might suggest that how AVs are implemented and their similarity to existing modes may be critical to the formation of attitudes and direction of inertia impacting adoption. Our research provides insights on the potential relationship between AVs and existing modes that could valuable in AV network design and service planning.

  • Travel Behavior as a Driver of Attitude: Car Use and Car Pride in U.S. Cities

    Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour
    (
    2020
    )

    Individuals attribute social status and personal image to owning and using a car (‘car pride’), which may interact with their travel behavior in complex ways. This study explores the multi-directional relations among car pride, car ownership, and car use for a sample of 1,236 adult commuters in New York City, NY and Houston, TX. Applying multivariate structural equation modeling and incorporating instrumental variables, we find evidence of a feedback loop among car pride, car ownership, and car use. Our results suggest that an individual with higher car pride is more likely to own a vehicle, and, enabled with this ownership, use it more frequently. And individuals who use their car more frequently are likely to feel more pride in owning and using their vehicles.

    This exploration of causal multi-directionality in transportation attitude-behavior relations has important implications for behavioral research, model development, and policy interventions. For researchers, potential bidirectionality must be anticipated from the outset of research design and accounted for appropriately in modeling to address underlying endogeneity. For policymakers, our results suggest that there are multiple intervention points within the reinforcing cycle of attitudes and car consumption. Policies could directly target car ownership and use or could consider influencing behavior through attitude change.

  • How does public support of transportation policies vary across countries?

    Transportation Research Board 99th Annual Meeting
    (
    2020
    )

    As the world shapes a global agenda to mitigate climate change, national governments are looking to define and build support for sustainable development strategies for the transportation sector. In this international landscape, countries will look to learn from one another, but identifying peer countries for this learning can prove a challenge. In this study, we measure public support for transportation policies and use this as measure of cultural distance for identifying peer countries. We modeled public support for 11 transportation policies in an international sample of 41,932 individuals in 51 countries/regions. Using a model that controls for individual effects, we measure pure “country-level” differences in public policy support. Measuring public support for different transportation policies can help policymakers understand how the public evaluates and envisions the role of government in shaping the current as well as future urban transport system, and to anticipate difficulties of implementing certain types of policies due to public resistance. In general, we find the highest public support for a given policy appears in countries that have not yet seen significant investment in the target infrastructure or service. We show that considering public support of transportation policies gives a different perspective than traditional indicators of economic development or motorization level, helping policymakers understand what the public wants and how they might build public support for new transportation policies. Finally, we present a clustering framework that goes beyond development status and geographical adjacency to help identify peer countries for policy learning.

  • Adoption of Exclusive and Pooled TNC Services in Singapore and the U.S.

    Transportation Research Board 99th Annual Meeting
    (
    2020
    )

    On-demand mobility services provided by transport network companies (TNCs) have experienced significant growth in adoption and diversification of services in major metropolitan cities around the world. This study synthesizes information on who uses TNC services, who (among these TNC users) are more likely to pool their trips, and what modes these services are replacing in the (metropolitan) U.S. and in Singapore. We find that the sociodemographics of TNC users in Singapore are similar to those in the U.S.: younger, highly educated, and higher income individuals are more likely to have used TNC services. Furthermore, younger individuals from households that do not own a car are more likely to have pooled in Singapore, while employment is another important predictor in the U.S. Concerning mode substitution, we find that, while TNC trips in the U.S. primarily induce additional trips or replace trips by public and nonmotorized transport, in Singapore they primarily replace personal/private vehicle trips. In Singapore, we explore mode substitution by exclusive and pooled TNC services separately, finding that pooled trips draw more from public and nonmotorized transport, while exclusive trips replace more personal/private vehicle trips. These results suggest that people in Singapore view exclusive and pooled TNC services as distinct travel options that may be more closely related to other private or public transport, respectively. Differences between the U.S. and Singapore highlight the importance of accounting for local context and suggests that the quality of all travel alternatives in the urban area will affect the mode substitution of TNC trips.

  • Latent Attitudes of Existing Travel Modes on Autonomous Vehicle Adoption

    Transportation Research Board 99th Annual Meeting
    (
    2020
    )

    With the quick advance of autonomous vehicle (AV) technology, understanding the potential demand of AV and its user characteristics has increasingly become a popular area of research. In consumer choice and technology adoption literature, whenever the demand of a new product is forecasted, the attitudes towards existing choices are found important in addition to new product attributes and consumer characteristics. While there is an abundance of literature from stated preference (SP) surveys identifying attitudes are just as important as demographics in forming a purchase or usage decision of AVs, past studies have seldom looked at how attitudes towards existing travel modes affect the new mode adoption. We conduct a dynamic online SP survey in Singapore on 2,003 individuals, with indicator questions about impressions on existing modes. We focus on how these attitudes affect AV adoption based on confirmatory factor analysis and discrete choice models with latent variables. The results show that having positive attitudes towards public transit casts a negative effect on AV adoption, while having positive attitudes towards ridesharing is positive on AV adoption. And, positive attitudes towards walking and driving do not have any significant effects. In addition, the model identifies that highly educated, wealthy, and/or younger people as the population to have more positive attitudes towards new technologies and more likely to adopt AVs. The research provides insights on potential relationship between AVs and existing modes, as well as the characteristics of potential audience, which may be of help in planning future AV services.

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    Adoption of Exclusive and Pooled TNC Services in Singapore and the U.S.

    ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems
    146
    ,
    (
    2020
    )

    On-demand mobility services provided by transport network companies (TNCs) have experienced significant growth in their adoption and diversification of services in major metropolitan cities around the world. This study analyzed primary data from Singapore to explore the sociodemographics of TNC users and determine who among TNC users is more likely to pool their trips and what modes these services are replacing. We compared these results with a comprehensive literature review of similar studies of TNC users in the metropolitan US. We found that the sociodemographics of TNC users in general are similar in Singapore and the US: younger, highly educated, and higher income individuals are more likely to have used TNC services. On the other hand, when differentiating by type of TNC service, we found that younger individuals from households that do not own a car are more likely to have pooled in Singapore, whereas employment is an important predictor in the US. We also found differences in mode substitution; whereas TNC trips in the US primarily induce additional trips or replace trips by public and non-motorized transport, in Singapore they primarily replace personal/private vehicle trips. In Singapore, we explored mode substitution by exclusive and pooled TNC services separately, and found that pooled trips draw more from public and nonmotorized transport, whereas exclusive trips replace more personal/private vehicle trips. These results suggest that people in Singapore view exclusive and pooled TNC services as distinct travel options that may be more closely related to other private or public transport, respectively. Differences between Singapore and the US highlight the importance of accounting for local context and suggest that the quality of all travel alternatives in the urban area will affect the mode substitution of TNC trips.

  • The Price of Privacy Control in Mobility Sharing

    Journal of Urban Technology
    (
    2020
    )

    One of the main features in mobility sharing applications is the exposure of personal data provided to the system. Transportation and location data can reveal personal habits, preferences, and behaviors, and riders could be keen not to share the exact location of their origin and/or destination. But what is the price of privacy in terms of decreased efficiency of the mobility sharing system? In this paper, for the first time, we address the privacy issues under this point of view and show how location privacy-preserving techniques could affect the performance of mobility sharing applications, in terms of both System Efficiency and Quality of Service. To this extent, we first apply different data-masking techniques to anonymize geographical information and then compare the performance of shareability networks-based trip matching algorithms for ride-sharing, applied to the real data and to the privacy-preserving data. The goal of the paper is to evaluate the performance of mobility sharing privacy-preserving systems and to shed light on the trade-off between data privacy and its costs. The results show that the total traveled distance increase due to the introduction of data privacy could be bounded if users are willing to spend (or "pay") for more time in order to share a trip, meaning that data location privacy impacts both efficiency and quality of service.

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    Rider-To-Rider Discriminatory Attitudes and Ridesharing Behavior

    Transportation Research Part F
    (
    2019
    )

    Using online survey data from N = 2,041 Uber and Lyft users in the United States collected in 2016 and 2018, this paper establishes the validity, reliability, and invariance of a measure of rider-to-rider race and social class discrimination. This measure is then incorporated into three structural models that investigate associations between rider-to-rider discriminatory attitudes and four aspects of ridesharing behavior. We find that rider-to-rider discriminatory attitudes do not significantly predict whether a TNC user has used a ridesharing service (such as uberPOOL or Lyft Line). However, among those who have used ridesharing services before, rider-to-rider discriminatory attitudes are strongly negatively predictive of an individual's level of satisfaction with the sharing option, and marginally negatively predictive of an individual's percentage of shared TNC trips. Furthermore, among those who have not yet used ridesharing services, rider-to-rider discriminatory attitudes are strongly negatively predictive of willingness to consider using uberPOOL or Lyft Line in the future. These associations between rider-to-rider discriminatory attitudes and multiple aspects of ridesharing behavior suggest that such attitudes may persistently discourage sharing. In fact, we find no statistically significant difference in rider-to-rider discrimination or in its relations with ridesharing behavior across the two survey years. Further research is required to identify strategies for addressing discriminatory attitudes in the ridesharing context and overcoming reluctance to sharing.

  • Built Environment and Autonomous Vehicles Mode Choice: A First Mile Scenario in Singapore

    Transportation Research Board 98th Annual Meeting
    (
    2019
    )

    This study investigates travel mode choice with on-demand autonomous vehicle (AV). It takes Singapore as the study area and specifically focuses on understanding the impacts of built environment (BE) on first-mile scenarios. A dynamic stated preference survey is developed to automatically generate first-mile travel scenarios based on the respondent’s dwelling location and real-world traffic information. Two mixed logit models with panel data structures are adopted to explore the impacts of BE on AV mode choice. The results reveal that BE factor is independent of trip specific and sociodemographic variables. Although including BE does not significantly improve the model fitting, it adds to explain the nuances of individual’s preference on travel mode choice. We then employ the models to forecast AV mode choice of 11,545 individuals from the Household Interview Travel Survey of Singapore. It provides a good understanding of AV market share in different areas and helps in evaluating the planning for AV deployment in Singapore. The estimation shows the mode shares of AV in most of pilot areas with AV plans are quite low. Thus, revisiting the planning of pilot areas for future AV deployment may be needed to avoid a spatial mismatch of on- demand AV service.

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    Transportation Policymaking in Beijing and Shanghai: Contributors, Obstacles, and Process

    Case Studies on Transport Policy
    (
    2019
    )

    With continued motorization and urbanization in Chinese cities, there is a growing demand for innovative transportation policies at the city level to address the challenges of congestion, local air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. Using Beijing and Shanghai as case studies, this paper draws on 32 in-depth semi-structured interviews with municipal government officials, academics, and transportation professionals to explore the city-level transportation policymaking process in Chinese megacities. Across the two cities, we identify three common contributors – policy learning, data informatization, and public opinion—and four obstacles—public complaint, unilateral decision-making, inadequate coordination among relevant departments, and lack of adaptiveness in policy implementation practice—to adopting timely and appropriate transportation policies. We then introduce a processual model that connects the contributors and obstacles identified within the flow of transportation policy among key actors in city-level government. This process shows how transportation policymaking in Chinese megacities is often reactive to public outcry over a transportation problem. This problem is investigated by a technical government research center that reports to the municipal transport committee. This committee then assesses public opinion and submits a policy recommendation to city government leadership, who make the final policy decision. Based on both case studies, we discuss potential recommendations for how to better enable transportation policymaking at the city level in China through more formalized processes of policy experimentation and public participation. We conclude with a discussion of limitations and areas of future research.

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    Discriminatory Attitudes between Ridesharing Passengers

    Transportation
    (
    2019
    )

    Prior studies have provided evidence of discrimination between drivers and passengers in the context of ridehailing. This paper extends prior research by investigating passenger-to-passenger discriminatory attitudes in the context of ridesharing. We conducted a survey of 1,110 TNC users in the US using Mechanical Turk, 76.5% of which have used UberPool or LyftLine, and estimated two structural equation models. The first model examines the influence of one’s demographic, social and economic characteristics on discriminatory attitudes toward fellow passengers in ridesharing, and how such influence varies by the targets of discrimination, i.e., race and class. The second model examines the influence of one's generic social dominance orientation on discriminatory attitudes in the ridesharing context. We find that discriminatory attitudes toward fellow passengers of differing class and race in the shared ride are positively correlated with respondents that are male or are women with children. A respondent's race does not have a significant effect on discriminatory attitudes, but white respondents that live in majority white counties are more likely to hold discriminatory attitudes with regard to race (no effect is observed regarding class preferences). The same is true of respondents that live in counties in which a larger share of the electorate voted for the Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential election. Conversely, higher-income respondents appear more likely to hold discriminatory attitudes regarding class, but no effect is observed regarding racial preferences. We also find that one's generic social dominance orientation strongly influences his/her discriminatory attitudes in ridesharing, supporting the claim that behavior in shared mobility platforms reflects long-standing social dominance attitudes. Further research is required to identify policy interventions that mitigate such attitudes in the context of ridesharing.

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    Car Pride and its Bidirectional Relations with Car Ownership: Case Studies in New York City and Houston

    Transportation Research Part A
    124
    ,
    (
    2019
    )

    The car fulfills not only instrumental transportation functions, but also holds important symbolic and affective meaning for its owners and users. In particular, owning and using a car can be a symbol of an individual’s social status or personal image (‘car pride’). This paper introduces and validates a standard measure of car pride estimated from 12 survey statements using a cross-sectional sample of 1,236 commuters in New York City and Houston metropolitan statistical areas. We find that car pride is higher in Houston than in New York City. We then empirically examine the bidirectional relation between car pride (attitude) and household car ownership (behavior) using structural equation modeling. To identify the bidirectional relationship we use an individual’s general pride as the instrumental variable (IV) for that same individual’s car pride; in the opposite direction, we use the average household vehicle ownership in the respondent’s census block group as the IV for the respondent’s household car ownership. We find that positive and statistically significant relations exist between car pride and car ownership in both directions. However, on average and in both city subsamples, the relation from car pride to household car ownership (attitude-to-behavior) is much stronger than the reverse (behavior-to-attitude). In fact, in our models car pride is more predictive of car ownership than most individual and household socio-demographics included in traditional ownership forecasting models, including income. Empowered with a well-validated, standard measure for car pride and a robust approach for exploring reciprocal attitude-behavior relations in cross-sectional data, future research can extend the current understanding presented in this paper to explore car pride’s relation with other travel behaviors, the dynamics of these attitude-behavior relations over time, and their implications for policies to promote sustainable travel behavior.

    Cite as: Moody, Joanna and Jinhua Zhao. 2019. Car pride and its bidirectional relations with car ownership: Case studies in New York City and Houston. Transportation Research Part A: Planning and Policy, 124: 334-353. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2019.04.005.

  • Induction_bus_and_car

    Car Pride and its Behavioral Implications: An Exploration in Shanghai

    Transportation
    (
    2018
    )

    Cars have symbolic significance beyond their functional purpose, and people often take pride in owning and using them. However, little is known about what this pride is and how it affects travel behavior. This paper constitutes the first attempt to provide a conceptual framework of car pride and test its behavioral implications. In this paper, car pride is defined as the self-conscious emotion derived from the appraisal of car ownership and use positively related to one’s identity goals. We categorize car pride into personal pride and social pride, and hypothesize how car pride interacts with behavioral and socio-economic factors. Using survey data (n = 1389) from Shanghai, we empirically test this framework with a series of structural equation models and discrete choice models. We show that: (1) car pride is weakly associated with socio-economic characteristics; (2) car pride correlates significantly with owning newer, more expensive, and larger cars, and Shanghai’s more expensive local car licenses; (3) car pride plays an important role in people’s future car purchase plans, especially for non-car owners on their first cars; (4) higher car pride is associated with more car use and deters people from reducing future car use; and (5) personal pride and social pride, though highly correlated, have different behavioral implications—while personal pride shows more variation based on socio-economic characteristics, social pride has a stronger correlation with car use. Car pride is an important factor in car ownership and use and should therefore be accounted for in travel behavior studies and mobility management policies. 

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    Capturing Hidden Attitudes: Introducing the Implicit Association Test to Transportation Planning

    Working paper
    (
    2017
    )

    Transportation planners routinely rely on surveys or other self-report measures (revealed preference or stated preference) to understand people’s travel preference and attitudes. This understanding is fundamental in designing policy interventions toward more sustainable travel choice. However, respondents may hold implicit attitudes that differ from their expressed answers to surveys because of social desirability bias, self-enhancement, or self-ignorance. This mismatch between attitudes measured through surveys and the actual preferences underlying behavior could have wide-ranging impacts on the shape and efficacy of policy interventions meant to influence people’s behavior.
    We introduce the Implicit Association Test (IAT) – a series of computer-based matching exercises that record response time and capture subconscious associations – and evaluated it with specific reference to attitudinal and behavioral understanding for transportation planning. We motivate the use of IAT as a complement to traditional self-report methods, explain the IAT’s underlying modus operandi, and discuss its merits and limitations. We present a case study that explores the influence of social status bias on commuter’s mode choice between car and bus. We find that, in this case, the implicit attitude captured by the IAT better predicts user’s primary commute mode than the explicit measure captured by Likert scale questions. 
    We demonstrate how the IAT can be applied to better understand the sustainability implications of social status bias on peoples travel behavior and we also discuss how the IAT could help planners capture perceptions of equity in transportation services and policies among different population segments. We conclude that the IAT is a viable and valuable tool that can offer unique diagnostic and predictive advantages to planners and policymakers and that further research is warranted to fully exploit IAT’s potential.

  • Induction_bus_and_car

    ‘Car Pride’ in New York City vs. Houston: Towards a Cross-Cultural Comparison

    (
    2016
    )

    Presented at the 56th Annual Conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP), Portland, OR, 2016

    Transportation planners routinely rely on surveys or other self-report measures to understand people’s mode choice attitudes. This understanding helps shape informational campaigns and other policy interventions to nudge travel behavior toward more sustainable modes and away from single-occupancy, gasoline-powered vehicles. However, respondents may hold implicit attitudes that differ from their expressed answers to surveys because of social desirability bias, self-enhancement, or self-ignorance (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2007). This mismatch between attitudes measured through surveys and the actual preferences underlying behavior could have wide-ranging impacts on the shape and efficacy of the policy interventions meant to shape people’s behavior.

    With results from an Implicit Association Test (IAT) and a survey exploring sociodemographic characteristics and travel behavior, we generate implicit and explicit measures of social status biases in the mode choice between car and bus. By social status bias we refer to people’s association of a mode with differing levels of success, wealth, or image that is often subconsciously influenced by the cultural context surrounding the travel decision. Using a novel two-part experimental design, the differences between implicit and explicit measures of bias are examined to understand how the IAT may complement or improve upon traditional survey methods to capture attitudinal biases and explain mode choice behavior. We corroborate previous research on the idea of pride as a factor in explaining car mode choice (Steg, 2004) as well as propose a new way to quantify these inherent or implicit social status biases that are controversial or difficult to consciously identify and articulate.

    We explore the sociodemographic and cultural variables that help explain variation in the magnitude and direction of ‘car pride’ in  New York City vs. Houston. We'll map levels of car pride throughout the five boroughs in NYC and discuss the policy implications of these variations at the municipal level. We lay the foundation for future work comparing motivation and formation of car pride across cultures (Shi et. al., 2015) and its impact on car ownership and usage. 

  • Induction_bus_and_car

    Implicit and Explicit Measures of Social Status Bias in Mode Choice

    Joanna Moody
    (
    2016
    )

    Transportation planners routinely rely on surveys or other self-report measures to understand people’s mode choice attitudes. This understanding helps shape informational campaigns and other policy interventions to nudge travel behaviour toward more sustainable modes and away from single-occupancy, gasoline-powered vehicles. However, respondents may hold implicit attitudes that differ from their expressed answers to surveys because of social desirability bias, self-enhancement, or self-ignorance. This mismatch between attitudes measured through surveys and the actual preferences underlying behaviour could have wideranging impacts on the shape and efficacy of the policy interventions meant to shape people’s behaviour. In this paper we explore the difference between implicit and explicit measures of social status biases in the mode choice between car and bus and how this bias may affect travel behaviour. By social status bias we refer to people’s association of a mode of transportation with differing levels of success, wealth, or image that is often subconsciously influenced by the cultural context surrounding the travel decision. Implicit measures are collected through an Implicit Association Test (IAT) while explicit measures are collected using traditional Likert-format survey questions. Throughout this discussion, we present preliminary results from primary data collection in New York City, United States.

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    A Ride to Remember: Experienced vs. Remembered Emotion on Public Transit

    95th Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting
    (
    2016
    )

    Prior research has shown disconnects between the subjective well-being a person experiences during an event and the subjective well-being the same individual remembers once the event has passed. Despite the differences that exist between experience and memory, memory is often used as a basis for making decisions about the future. Measures of utility in transportation decision models have begun to incorporate concepts of subjective well-being. A better understanding of the differences between experience and memory will allow researchers to understand the human decision making process more accurately. This paper describes a survey used to examine differences between experience and memory for riders of public transit. The survey was given to people riding the Boston subway system and respondents were asked to rate the emotions they felt during their trip on several scales. Later, a follow-up survey was given where respondents rated the emotions they remembered feeling on the previously surveyed trip using the same scales. The results of this survey show that there is a statistically significant difference between the emotional net affect reported during the trip and in the follow-up survey. Respondents indicated significantly more emotional satisfaction while onboard than they did when recalling the trip. Significant differences were also found specifically in feelings of comfort and boredom. This research indicates that the subjective well-being which people experience during a trip is not the same as they remember from it, which has possible impacts on the understanding and modeling of transportation decision-making.

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    My brain at the bus stop: an exploratory framework for applying EEG-based emotion detection techniques in transportation study

    Working paper
    (
    2015
    )

    Emotion has important implications on travel decisions and behaviors. Emotions related to transportation have usually been assessed using opinion-based and other qualitative methods. The advances in electroencephalographic (EEG) algorithms and hardware now provide new possibilities for assessing emotions in real time and using quantitative data. This paper describes the features of the EEG-based emotion detection technique, presents a framework for the experiment design process, and discusses its application in the context of public transportation with reference to a pilot experiment in Cambridge, MA, using a portable EEG neuro-headset to measure the emotion change during the experience of waiting for a bus.  Other areas in transportation study might also take advantage of this technique and gain new insights into travel emotion and behavior.

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    Customer Loyalty Differences Between Captive and Choice Transit Riders

    Journal of the Transportation Research Board
    2415
    ,
    (
    2014
    )

    Traditionally, efforts to increase the customer base of public transportation agencies have focused primarily on attracting first-time users. Customer retention, however, has many benefits not often realized. Loyal customers provide recommendations to others, increase and diversify their use of the service, and do not require acquisition costs associated with new customers. An earlier study identified key drivers of customer loyalty, with the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) in Illinois as a case study. A customer loyalty model was created with service value, service quality, customer satisfaction, problem experience, and perception of CTA as constructs. The present study examined customer loyalty differences of captive and choice riders. Captive riders had no viable travel alternatives and might have continued to use transit even if unhappy with service. Choice riders chose to use transit after they compared travel options and might have switched to an alternative if service degraded. Captive riders reported experiencing more problems and were more sensitive to problems; each additional problem brought significant drops in service quality ratings. Captive riders tolerated problems and continued to use transit but showed discontent through their ratings of service quality. Service value was insignificant in captive riders’ loyalty decisions because cost–benefit analysis defined service value as irrelevant to them. The relationship between perceptions of CTA and of service quality was stronger for choice riders. If they began the service with high opinions of the transit agency, they were much more likely to have high ratings of service quality than were captive riders.

  • Induction_bus_and_car

    A Subjective Measure of Car Dependence

    Jinhua Zhao
    Journal of the Transportation Research Board
    2231
    ,
    (
    2011
    )

    A subjective measure of car dependence was developed on the basis of people's own assessment of their reliance on car use. The measure supplements the commonly used objective measure on the basis of actual car use. Structural equation models (SEMs) were estimated to quantify the subjective dependence and to examine its determinants: demographics, socioeconomics, and land use and transit access. The comparison between subjective dependence and actual car use disclosed significant differences between the measures, despite their statistical linkage. The measures also differed significantly in terms of how they were influenced by the determinants. Segmenting the population by both measures revealed 20% of the sample with contrasting subjective and objective measures. After controlling for the determinants, the SEMs examined relations between subjective car dependence (attitude), actual car use (behavior), and the intent to reduce car use (intention). Given the cross-sectional nature of the data, causality could not be proven. Two plausible structural relationships were tested: that actual car use determined subjective car dependence and that no direction of causality was assumed. Subjective car dependence mediates the impact of car use on the intent to reduce it: the direct effect of car use on the intent to reduce it is 0.2; the indirect effect through stated car dependence is -0.6; the total effect is -0.4. Actual car use explains approximately 50% of the variation in subjective car dependence, which, together with actual car use, explains approximately 60% of the variation in people's intent to reduce car use.

Team Members