Research On Travel Characteristics Of Senior People And Related Transport Policy

According to “the development trend of China's aging population forecast report” and the latest United Nations population data shows that China is currently in the status of rapid aging. With aging increase, people's freedom to travel diminished, that is, people reduce their mobility. However, the wealth of our society, the health of the elderly and education than previous generations has been improved a lot. Contemporary elderly have more free time and travel demand, they value their quality of life more than previous generations of older persons, and therefore, they may increase social travel activity, but now estimations about social activities for older people are rare. Although scholars have researched travel problems for the elderly during the last decade, there are only studies about elderly psychological characteristics, travel features, travel safety, public welfare etc. there are very few studies about the travel characteristics of the elderly and related transport policy.In this paper, we will take the travel data of Beijing City, Shaoxing City and Liaoyang City for examples. We take use of the negative binomial model to estimate travel times and take such factors as the gender, age, education, income as influencing factors. Besides, the significance and sensitivity of some parameters are examined. The findings show that some factors have significant effect on trip rates, such as car ownership, education level, and the distance to the nearest bus stop. What's more, we take use of mixed logit model to analyze the effects of factors such as gender, age, education, occupation on the travel mode choice of the elderly. The study shows that men are more likely to choose private cars and electric bicycles than women. Full time workers tend to choose public transport to travel. The less required time to the nearest bus stop on foot, the more likely the elderly will choose to bus and walk. Besides, travel time budget is estimated with the method partial least square of structure equation. For the travel time budget, the result shows that economic condition has a strong connection with the non-elderly travel time budget, the better economic conditions, the more you want to optimize travel costs and shorten travel time. While individual characteristics, such as age, gender and monthly travel expenses, have a strong connection with elderly travel time budget.