Abstract:
Educational-related trips are a major component of usual traffic in peak hours on a typical day. For proper transportation planning, the dynamics and preferences of educational trips must be understood. Educational trips have been broadly studied in European and North American countries. But limited studies are available in developing countries. This study identifies gender-based model choices, preferences, and travel characteristics among school-going children and investigates the satisfaction level of respondents with public transport and also developed a mode choice model for educational trips in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Descriptive analysis, chi-square tests, independent and paired sample t-tests were conducted to find out significant differences between genders and other travel characteristics. For modelling, the multinomial logit model (MNL) was conducted in SPSS. Using Slovin’s sampling method, a total data of 370 samples were collected from which 310 samples were used for model calibration and the remaining 60 were used for validation purposes. Results show significant difference between mode choices and preferences of both male and female students. There was no significant difference in travel time, travel distance, and travel cost, but males tended to make more trips than females. The satisfaction level shows that females having a more negative opinion about public transport than males. Significance difference between actual and perceived satisfaction was also observed, which implies students are more dissatisfied with public transport and the result of the Multinomial Logit Model shows that gender, age, household income, total travel time, cost, and distance are the influential factors that affect mode choice of students and it is also found that travel time by school bus and public transport affect the utilities of these two modes positively.
