Is Individual Environmental Consciousness One of the Determinants in Transport Mode Choice?

This paper models a transport negative impact on environment as one of attributes of the transport mode. By this modeling, we are able to examine whether individual environmental consciousness has a significant effect on his/her choice of transport mode. A survey data from Saito and Onohara Area in Northern Osaka of Japan is used to estimate the model specified by Heteroscedastic Extreme Value (HEV). Both of the estimated and simulated results imply that individual environmental consciousness does influence his/her decision on transport mode choice. Furthermore, the likelihood ratio tests suggest that both the utility and scale parameters are not equal across sub-samples of university commuters, research-facility commuters, and residents. The details of the comparison across sub-samples suggest that we may learn more from subdividing a whole sample into several sub-samples if we could select them based on their characteristics.