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Abstract:
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Currently, public transit accounts for less than 2 percent of all urban travel. With recent concerns about increased carbon emissions threatening to speed up global warming and national security concerns about maintaining reliable and sustainable oil sources, future use of the private automobile could be jeopardized. A better understanding of how an individual's perceptions of safety, cost and convenience impact their dominant mode choice could aid policymakers and transportation planners. An analysis, including bivariate statistics and probit regression modeling, using the 2001 National Household Transportation Survey, is conducted to evaluate the impact of perceptions on the choice to take a private automobile or public transit for the journey to work. Indicating safety concerns, price of gasoline or highway congestion to be a large problem is negatively correlated with choosing public transit as the dominant mode choice. Despite statistically significant results, the marginal effects of safety, price of gasoline and highway congestion on predicting dominant mode are relatively small, with each separately impacting mode choice by less than one percent. |