Long distance mode choice and distributions of values of travel time savings in three European countries

The study presented in this paper uses Stated Preferences (SP) data on mode choice collected as part of a recent survey on long distance travel undertaken in three European countries. The purpose of this article is twofold. It aims at exploring the impacts of the choice of mixing probability distributions while accounting for unobserved taste heterogeneity and it aims at focusing on the derived estimation of the distributions of values of travel time savings (VTTS). We compare eleven distributions, each having particular properties in terms of domain, location, scale, and shape. Due to the repetitive nature of the SP experiments, we estimate mixtures of Multinomial Logit (MNL) models for panel data. The results show that the mixing distributions differ from one country to another, suggesting existence of European disparities as it regards long-distance mode choice. The results also show that long-distance travellers pay a lot more attention to access and egress travel times to and from the main mode than to total travel time with the main mode.