Abstracts Transportation

An origin-destination based train station choice model for new public transport connections to train stations:

by MY Verschuren

A change in the access and egress system, like a new metro line, will automatically influence the station choices of train travellers. Given the fact that several new large public transport connections will be opened in the near future, there is the need to precisely forecast how the distribution of train travellers among stations will change, as it may give cause to (logistical) changes in the operation of the railway system. The most important factors for choosing at which station people will access the train are their origin and destination (ATOC, 2009; Hoogendoorn-Lanser, 2005; Debrezion, et al., 2007). Nevertheless, the current prognosis model of NS, De Kast, is however not able to realistically forecast the effect of new or significantly improved public transport connections to train stations on the distribution of train travellers among these stations as it does not take into account the train travellers' origins and destinations and different access/egress modes. This research therefore develops and estimates an origin-destination based station choice model that takes into account the access/egress modes walking, bicycle, car, and public transport. For an origin-destination based approach, detailed information about train travellers' origins and final destinations is required (ATOC, 2009; Wardman, et al., 2007). Nevertheless, filling a complete origin-destination matrix for a detailed geographical scale for all train travellers in the whole Netherlands would require massive amount of data, which simply is not available. Therefore, in this study, the city of Amsterdam was treated as an internal area with origins and destinations at the lowest geographical scale, hence the four-digit postal codes. Then it has been examined which destination stations in the rest of the Netherlands had the same distributions among the origin stations in the internal zone, hence the Amsterdam region. The results indicate that from the first intercity station onwards, where one would always travel to by an Intercity train instead of by a local train, the station choice probabilities are equal. This implies that all origins and destinations from the specific intercity station onward can be grouped into the same external zone. This implies that travellers that travel from the internal area to any destination station in the specific external zone would choose the same origin (intercity) station in the internal area to get there. On the short distance, this is however not justified as local trains mostly call at more stations in the internal area. Another external zone is therefore added between the long-distance external zone and the internal area, to account for the short distance trips. Then, using the survey data, per external zone the percentage of train travellers that travels to (inbound) or from (outbound) each internal zone is defined. This results in a relative distribution of train travellers between the considered in- and external zones for both in- and outbound trips. The shares are then multiplied by the number of… Advisors/Committee Members: Chorus, C.G., Molin, E.J.E., Van Nes, R., De Bruyn, M..