01516621

Component

Rapid urbanization and motorization around the world presents innumerable challenges to different countries, cities, and individual citizens. The increased rate of car use especially in rich developing countries has serious implications in terms of pollution, noise, and congestion. While the struggle in the Western world focuses on the battle with automobiles and their dominance in all aspects of daily lives, the developing countries in the Gulf, such as Qatar, face the dilemma of serving tremendous growth in the travel demand constrained by limited land and inferior infrastructure. To address the fast growing transportation demands in the Qatari’s urban areas, the government introduced a major project, the Doha Metro Network. This metro system will ultimately consist of four Metro lines with 98 stations serving the City of Doha (capital of Qatar). The metro’s first phase is expected to be completed in 2020 in order to be ready for the Qatar 2022 FIFA Work Cup, while the final phase is expected to be completed in 2026. In order to benefit from this new Metro line in reducing traffic congestion problems in Doha, the Metro line must attract sufficient commuters especially those depending extensively on private cars. This clearly means that this new service must be attractive with a reasonable level of service to attract large numbers of car users to switch to the new Metro. This goal can be achieved by a clear understanding of the user’s needs and expectations. This paper aim is providing a comprehensive study that strives to identify and quantify the significant factors affecting commuters’ perspectives, preferences and tendencies to use this new metro network for their daily trips in the future. The data used for the analyses was obtained from a self-reported questionnaire survey carried out among 316 commuters living in Doha. To achieve the objectives of this study, different data mining techniques were employed including conditional distributions and two-way analysis. In addition, logistic regression and structural equation modeling approaches were developed. The results revealed that location of metro stations, metro station’s features, metro’s features, gender, number of daily trips, purpose of trips, and average duration of trips in Doha were the significant factors that affected commuters’ willingness/tendency to use the new metro service of Doha. In addition, it was found that far distances between metro stations and the origin and final destination, weather conditions in Qatar, and people accustomed to using their private cars were the main self-reported reasons that might prevent people living in Doha from using the new metro service. The results of this study provide authorities and decision makers in Doha with valuable information that should be taken into consideration prior to implementing the new metro service. These proposed policies/suggestions, if applied, will contribute to the success of the new metro system.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP065 Rail Transit Systems.

01503729

14-0595

English

22p

2014

Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Commuters; Light rail transit; Mode choice; Public transit; Regression analysis; Structural equation modeling; Surveys

Doha (Qatar)

Passenger Transportation; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2014 Paper #14-0595

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 27 2014 2:16PM