Trip chaining as a barrier to the propensity to use public transport

Trip chaining is a growing phenomenon in travel and activity behaviour. Ind ividuals increasingly seek out opportunities to minimise the amount of trav el required as part of activity fulfilment, given the competing demands on time budgets and their valuation of travel time savings. This search for wa ys of fulfilling (more) activities with less travel input has produced a nu mber of responses, one of which is trip chaining. A particularly important policy implication of trip chaining is the potential barrier it creates in attracting car users to switch to public transport. This paper seeks to imp rove our understanding of trip chaining as a barrier to public transport us e. A series of discrete choice models are estimated to identify the role th at socio-economic and demographic characteristics of households have on the propensity to undertake trip chains of varying degrees of simplicity/compl exity that involve use of the car or public transport with an embedded comm uting or non-commuting primary purpose. Multinomial logit, nested logit and random parameter logit models are developed and contrasted to establish th e gains in relaxing the strict conditions of the multinomial logit model.