INCOME EFFECTS AND OTHER NEW FINDINGS ON THE COMPLEXITY OF TRANSIT TOURS

摘要

It has long been held that tours involving the use of public transit are less complex, includingfewer stops and types of activities within a tour, compared with tours made by automobile orother modes. However, this traditional hypothesis was developed and supported by householdtravel surveys which include a relatively small subsample of transit users. This paper reports onrecent on-board transit ridership surveys in Indianapolis, Indiana, and Columbus, Ohio, thatcollected information on the complexity of transit riders' tours. The results suggest that, contraryto common belief, transit tours are at least as complex as tours by other modes, based onhousehold surveys of the same regions. The new surveys also reveal that income and vehicleownership have a significant and opposite effect on the complexity of transit tours as they haveon tours by other modes. Thus, the traditional hypothesis of simpler transit tours does hold formore affluent transit users but not for a typical, less affluent transit user. Comparisons of the on-board and household surveys further suggests that the traditional hypothesis of simple transittours may have arisen from a bias toward more affluent riders in the subsample of householdtravel surveys that contain transit. The overall finding that transit tours may actually be morecomplex and involve more types of activities than previously thought has important implicationsfor transit planning.