One major advantage of commuter rail and transit over driving alone: you can text and not die.
That advantage affects people’s transportation mode choices, according to a new study from Georgia Tech. But not as much as convenience, which includes transit service reliability and the ability to run errands during the trip.
Researchers Aliaksandr Malokin, Giovanni Circella, and Patricia Mokhtarian surveyed over 2,000 commuters in Northern California to assess how multitasking – as measured by the “propensity to use a laptop, tablet, or notebook” – impacted mode choice, if at all.
Although they found that the biggest factors affecting mode choice are convenience, comfort, and benefit/cost, the ability to multitask (the fourth-most important factor) affected at least 1.1 percent of commuter rail trips and 2.3 percent of transit trips. Without the ability to multitask, those percentages of riders would drive alone, the Georgia Tech team estimated.
“The effect is small, but not trivial,” the researchers write. ” It is probably fair to say that although the ability to perform activities while traveling has a significant effect, it is not the dominant criterion in mode choice considerations.”
What this means: Given that convenience was a more important factor in people’s mode choice than the ability to multitask, transit agencies should invest in, frankly, providing more convenient transit service – that means more frequent buses.
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