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The National Academies

TCRP H-04A [Completed]

Strategies for Influencing Choice of Urban Travel Mode

  Project Data
Funds: $250,000
Research Agency: Charles River Associates, Inc.
Principal Investigator: Michael Kemp
Effective Date: 10/17/1994
Completion Date: 10/16/1997

TCRP Report 27 addresses transit ridership and its share of the local travel market, presents the current context for transit's market share, describes public policies that affect the market share, and reviews traveler behavior and its implications for transit. Having provided this framework, the report examines initiatives that may help to maintain or improve transit ridership and summarizes the major research findings.

The objective of this project was to examine a number of different policies that might be pursued at a local or metropolitan area level, with or without federal or state government encouragement, that have some potential for increasing or maintaining transit's market share. The policies examined in this project were diverse, ranging from transit system pricing and service adjustments (which can be carried out unilaterally by a transit agency) to initiatives that would affect land use development and the cost of automobile travel (which require significant interagency and possibly private sector cooperation). The strategies included in this project were ones viewed as having some potential for affecting transit ridership positively, but did not include certain promising policies--such as parking management and pricing--that are being addressed through other concurrent TCRP studies.

TCRP Report 27 includes 14 appendixes that present the research results in greater operational detail. Eight of the appendixes are case studies of initiatives, carried out by transit systems in the United States and Canada, for which ridership gains were one of the explicit or implicit objectives. Each case study describes the transit system, presents a program or strategy, evaluates its impacts, and presents a summary and conclusion. The case studies were Metro-North's Hudson Rail Link, GO Transit's (Ontario) fare and service integration policies, the Twin Cities' Team Transit program, Tidewater Regional Transit's timed transfer system, Seattle's U-Pass and Flexpass programs, Portland's Fareless Square program, land use and transit coordination in Metropolitan Toronto, and pricing of road use and other traffic limitation strategies. Chapter 6 of the report presents cross-cutting impressions and observations drawn from the case studies. This chapter also addresses the transferability of the results to other locations.

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