The safety perceptions of road, rail and air and their implication on travel choices

Highlighted by the 9/11 disaster, safety and security concerns have become more paramount than ever, sometimes even becoming the sole decision factor in certain travelers’ choice selection process. Closely related to the solutions to national security and infrastructure protection issues, intermodal and multimodal access becomes more important than ever. For example, both Maglev and High Speed Rail (HSR) have been examined as potential intercity travel alternatives and strategic backup systems for the national transportation network. The two key factors mentioned above, have motivated the authors to undertake a travel behavior survey and model calibration to investigate the importance of a few proposed factors in the travel choice decision process. A combination of revealed preference and stated preference survey was conducted to collect travel behavior data for 240 individuals who have made trips between New York and Washington D.C. The stated preference data are particularly applicable in implicating the characteristics and impacts of the potential new high speed ground transportation modes, such as HSR and Maglev. Binary logit discrete choice models have been calibrated to reflect the travel choices affected by four factors, travel time, monetary cost, safety, and reliability. This paper reports the initial findings of model calibration and their implications.