Examining the Influence of Urban form and Land Use on Bus Ridership in Montreal

The prevalence of sub urban life in North American cities in the recent decades has resulted in increased private vehicle usage while reducing public transportation system usage. An oft suggested alternative to reduce the negative externalities of the personal vehicle use is the development of an efficient public transportation system that provides equitable service and accessibility to the population as well as contributes to the reduction of air pollution and GHG emissions. The emphasis of this study is on a systems perspective where transit ridership is studied from the perspective of the transit provider, with the objective of quantifying the influence of transit system operational attributes, transportation system infrastructure attributes and built environment attributes on the disaggregate stop level boardings and alightings for the bus network in the Montreal region. A Composite Marginal Likelihood (CML) based ordered response probit (ORP) model that simultaneously allows to incorporate the influence of exogenous variables along and potential correlations between boardings and alightings a r multiple time periods examined is employed Our results illustrate that headway impacts ridership negatively, while the presence of public transportation around the stop has a positive and significant effect. Moreover, parks, commerces, and residential area, amongst others, impact boardings and alightings at different bus stops. The results a provide transit agencies a mechanism to study the influence of transit accessibility, transit connectivity, transit schedule alterations (to increase/reduce headway), and land use pattern changes on ridership

Examining the influence of stop level infrastructure and built environment on bus ridership in Montreal

We studied transit ridership from the perspective of the transit provider, with the objective of quantifying the influence of transit system operational attributes, transportation system infrastructure attributes and built environment attributes on the disaggregate stop level boardings and alightings by time of day for the bus transit system in the Montreal region. A Composite Marginal Likelihood (CML) based ordered response probit (ORP) model, that simultaneously allows us to incorporate the influence of exogenous variables and potential correlations between boardings and alightings across multiple time periods of the day is employed. Our results indicate that headway affects ridership negatively, while the presence of public transportation around the stop has a positive and significant effect. Moreover, parks, commercial enterprises, and residential area, amongst others, have various effects across the day on boardings and alightings at bus stops. An elasticity analysis provides useful insights. Specifically, we observe that the most effective way to increase ridership is to increase public transport service and accessibility, whereas enhancements to land use have a smaller effect on ridership. The framework from our analysis provides transit agencies a mechanism to study the influence of transit accessibility, transit connectivity, transit schedule alterations (to increase/reduce headway), and land-use pattern changes on ridership

Travel mode choice and transit route choice behavior in Montreal: insights from McGill University members commute patterns

In developed countries such as Canada and United States, a significant number of individuals depend on automobile as their main mode of transport. There has been a stronger push towards analyzing travel behavior at the individual level so that transportation agencies can formulate appropriate strategies to reduce the auto dependency. Towards this pursuit of enhancing our understanding on travel behavior, we examine individual home to work/school commute patterns in Montreal, Canada with an emphasis on the transit mode of travel. The overarching theme of this paper is to examine the effect of the performance of the public transportation system on commuter travel mode and transit route choice (for transit riders) in Montreal.We investigate two specific aspects of commute mode choice: (1) the factors that dissuade individuals from commuting by public transit and (2) the attributes that influence transit route choice decisions (for those individuals who commute by public transit). This study employs a unique survey conducted by researchers as part of the McGill University Sustainability project. The survey collected information on commute patterns of students, faculty and staff from McGill University. In addition, detailed sociodemographic and residential location information was also collected. The analysis was undertaken using multinomial logit model for the travel mode choice component and a mixed multinomial logit model for the transit route choice component. The model estimation results were employed to conduct policy sensitivity analysis that allows us to provide recommendations to public transportation and metropolitan agencies