Factors Affecting Mode Choice: A Case Study in Dhaka

Abstract

Transportation is one of the most important but also hardest-to-solve problems of modern-day cities. In developed countries, the transportation sector contributes a lot to the GDP and its services are a precondition for economic activities as well as leisure activities. It is one of the vital sectors supporting human activity because without any movement it is impossible for people to fulfill their needs; however, the scenario is not the same for developing countries. For a city like Dhaka which is one of the least motorized cities in the world, its traffic congestion is one of the highest. Unplanned urbanization, poor transportation planning, and lower land utilization efficiency has turned the city into a dangerous urban jungle. So to clean up this mess new transportation system should be adopted .To make the system adaptable to people it is very important to know about their particular mode of transport they choose for major trip on daily basis. More or less, the choice of transportation mode is affected by many factors such as: gender, income, travel time, convenience, safety etc. All of these factors are related with the socio economic and service attributes. This study identified the factors affecting transportation mode choice from internal factor (traveler aspects) and from the external side (service attributes).This was done by conducting a questionnaire survey 4 particularly the people who live and work in Dhaka .The questionnaire included both factors from the traveler aspect and service attributes . Discrete choice model have been developed using the survey data and the the coefficients of the utility functions have been estimated using maximum likelihood approach. In addition to this, graphical analysis has been done to reflect the influence of factors over particular mode of transport.