Travelers’ Route Choice Decisions in the Context of Public Transport with Special attention to the role of Main and Side Train Stations

Transportation planners in the Netherlands have been constantly trying to provide high-quality public transport. Multimodal mobility holds a large part of public transportation and this means that transfers need to me made while traveling. However, transfers cause high disutility to the travelers. In order to attract more passengers into the public transportation mobility and at the same time decongest the most crowded railway stations, it is aimed to find out what influences travelers’ decision making process regarding the route choices they have. Therefore, the current research investigates the characteristics that have an impact in the route choice behavior of public transport travelers with special attention to the role of the main and side railway stations. For this purpose, a stated choice experiment was designed and data was mainly collected in the area of the Zernike campus in the city of Groningen. The analysis of data was conducted by a Binary Logistic Regression Model and the results show that time-related and crowding-related characteristics were proved to be significant. The estimated model showed that the facilities of a railway station are not influential. However, some additional models with separate groups were estimated, showing that some socio-demographic attributes and travel-experience characteristics proved to have an impact on the outcome as well.