01660392

Component

The paper employed a latent class discrete choice model with endogenous social interaction effect model to investigate the role of gender and age-cohort-specific peer or social interaction effect on the choice of owning a bike by the university students in Toronto. For the empirical investigation, it used a dataset collected through a web-based travel survey among the students of all 4 universities with 7 campuses in Toronto. Two latent classes of bicycle owners are identified: peer-conforming and peer-indifferent. Empirical model proves that the influence of age-cohort specific peer-group social interactions is real and very strong on the choices of bicycle ownership. Gender of the students play a defining role in partitioning a student into the latent classes of bicycle users, however, female students are influenced more by the choices of fellow female students than do the male students. Also, considerable heterogeneity exists in such age-cohort specific social interaction effects. The finding of this study has clear policy relevance and calls for policy initiatives. Policy initiatives that target female students of specific age groups will have greater potential in influencing bicycle usage. Overall, the choice of owning a bicycle is influenced by various variables in complex ways. This makes the potential of social engineering type policy initiatives highly potential for success in increasing bicycle ownership among the university students.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB40 Standing Committee on Transportation Demand Forecasting.

18-03088

English

20p

2018

Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Bicycles; Bicycling; Choice models; College students; Mode choice; Social factors

Toronto (Canada)

Planning and Forecasting; Society; Vehicles and Equipment

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2018 Paper #18-03088

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 8 2018 10:44AM