Abstract
Most of the studies about railway route choice behavior have been based on the decision-making theory applied to the two processes; arranging alternatives and choosing from the choice set. This paper focuses on the first process, preparation of choice set, which has not been fully understood. We used the dataset from our original survey responded by 1217 railway commuters in Tokyo metropolitan area. First, we examined the existence of route captive passengers who did not choose their commuting rail lines but decided inherently. It is found that those captive passengers have a dominant alternative in terms of the level of service. We conclude that those individuals had to be excluded from the dataset. Most of the other travelers who have compensatory alternatives in their choice set can be regarded as selective decision-makers and included in the analysis. Second, we compared the routes arranged in the choice set with the ones not included in the choice set. Based on calculating the difference and ratio of service level between two routes, we could infer the thresholds which control whether each route alternative is included in the choice set or not. Moreover, passengers consider total travel time, fare, number of transfers, and congestion rate when they arrange alternatives as a choice set. These two results help us to arrange route choice alternatives before modelling the behavior of railway commuters.
