Determinants of College Students Choosing Railway during the Spring Festival Travel Rush in China: Preliminary Results Using Stated Preference Approach

摘要

This paper investigates the determinants of college students choosing railway travel during the spring festival travel rush in China. A stated choice experiment based on the rule of orthogonality was designed, in which four hypothetical trains (i.e., two local and two high-speed trains) plus a non-chosen option consisted of a choice set. A preliminary survey based on this design was carried out, in which 864 valid observations were collected. Then, an error component logit model, considering panel effect was established and estimated. Results confirmed satisfactory model goodness of fit. This study revealed some insights about college students' behavior of choosing rail travel and their preferences towards local and high-speed trains in spring festival travel rush. The results can be further regarded as a reference of prior knowledge in an efficient stated choice experiment design, which would generate statistically more efficient estimation results.