The objective of this research is to study the influence that safety perceptions have on travelers’ behavior in a broad array of choice contexts and investigate issues that have not been sufficiently addressed by the transportation literature, such as the influence of tangible attributes on perceptions and the influence of indicators’ complexity on the model estimates. Using three existing databases, we study the influence of risk perception on drivers' behavior, the influence of safety and comfort perceptions on individuals’ preferences for inland waterway passenger transportation, and the influence of these latent variables in the competition between BRT and motorcycle taxis. We design two ad-hoc surveys, the first one to study the influence of safety perceptions and some individual attitudes toward cycling, on the intention to use the public transportation integration on a bike and ride strategy. The second survey study safety and comfort perceptions of riding conventional feeder buses and auto-rickshaws as part of a BRT system. We demonstrate that tangible attributes have a significant effect on both the utility and the safety perception of individuals, which allows for the evaluation of policies related to latent variables and studying how a certain policy modifies safety perception. We also prove that the number of indicators per latent variable, the type of the scale and the granularity in which indicators are measured do affect the error variance of the measurement component. We show that the use of odd-numbered Likert scales contributes to a lower error variance of the measurement component
