Evaluating user preferences for public transit technologies in the Greater Toronto Area

There are many different factors that affect the ridership potential of public transit technologies, many of which are difficult to quantify. Some of these effects include reliability, comfort, safety, and accessibility. In addition to these effects, it is often hypothesized that travelers have inherent preferences for certain public transit technologies independent of their actual service characteristics. In light of these uncertainties, the goal of this research is to quantify these technology preferences and to discover whether there are modal biases in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) that are independent from mode level of service characteristics.; This study uses travel survey data to build discrete choice models incorporating transit technology specific variables to quantify existing preferences in the GTA. The results show that a preference for rail (Subway and Streetcar) exists, but the magnitude of this effect cannot be quantified due to difficulties isolating the technology preference from other service characteristics.