Illuminating Perceptions Affecting Mode Choice: A Combination of Qualitative Perspective and ICLV Modeling

Understanding travel behavior is one of the most critical challenges in transportation planning. Planners can gain profound insights into travel behavior by exploring people’s perceptions and attitudes. Qualitative research as an independent approach or in a combination of a quantitative research can provide a deep understanding of people’s perceptions in transportation. This study used both qualitative and quantitative techniques to inspect citizens’ perceptions towards travel behavior. The interview results of the qualitative approach indicated that environmental concerns were mainly rooted in spiritual ethics. In addition, the respondents identified comfort, time, safety, and environmental concerns as the critical determinants in travel mode choice. The characteristics of individuals and transportation alternatives as well as environmental concerns were considered to affect mode choice in the quantitative study. The results, extracted from an Integrated Choice and Latent Variable (ICLV) model, showed that environmental concerns influenced people to choose public transportation. Furthermore, the findings indicated that young and middle-aged people preferred to use public transportation. Still, the preference was about quadruple for the middle-aged group.