Modeling Intercity Mode Choice and Airport Choice in the United States

The aim of this study was to develop a framework to model travel choice behavior in order to estimate intercity travel demand at nation-level in the United States. Nested and mixed logit models were developed to study national-level intercity transportation in the United States. A separate General Aviation airport choice model to estimates General Aviation person-trips and number of aircraft operations though more than 3000 airports was also developed. The combination of the General Aviation model and the logit models gives the capability to estimate a full spectrum of intercity travel demand in the United States.The logit models were calibrated using a nationwide revealed preference survey (1995 American Travel Survey). Separate models were developed for business and non-business trip purposes. An airport choice model is integrated into the mode choice model to estimate both the market share between any origin-destination pair and other modes of transportation, and the market share split between airports associated with the origin-destination pairs. The explanatory variables used in the utility functions of the models are travel time, travel cost, and travelerâs household income. The logit models are used to estimate the market share of automobile and commercial air transportation between 3091 counties and 443 commercial service airports in the United States. The model was also used to estimate market share for on-demand air taxi services. Given an input county-to-county trip demand table, the models were used to estimate county-to-county travel demand by automobile and commercial airline between all counties and commercial service airports in the United States. The model has been integrated into a computer software framework called the Transportation Systems Analysis Model (TSAM) that estimates nationwide intercity travel demand in the United States.