A joint mode-transit service choice model incorporating the effect of regional transport service timetables

Transit systems offer substantially different services in urban and inter-urban areas; this usually leads to different assumptions about user behaviour in path choice modelling. These differences have not yet been recognised in mode choice modelling. Consistent with the above, in this paper we propose a joint mode-transit service choice model where the elementary alternatives are specific services of the available transit modes together with the private car. Among the attributes of transit services we propose inclusion of the difference between the desired arrival time of the traveller and the arrival time of the specific service (early/late arrival penalty), instead of service/line frequency. Different utility specifications were tested and their results compared for different correlation structures (both nested and cross-nested). In general a high significance was observed in the case of the early/late arrival penalty parameters, indicating the importance of such factors in mode choice.