Preference accommodating and preference shaping : incorporating traveler preferences into transportation planning

This dissertation examines the psychological factors that influence travel behavior such as people's personality traits, environmental attitudes, car pride and perceptions of convenience and comfort. Despite the recognition of the importance of these psychological factors in better understanding travel behavior, transportation agencies have failed to integrate them into planning practice and policy debate in the quantitative way. This dissertation reflects on this failure, identifies the barriers that have contributed to it, and reviews innovations in travel behavior research which may help overcome these barriers. This dissertation proposes a structure for analyzing traveler preferences that incorporates these psychological factors into travel behavior analysis. A set of eight factors are presented as the latent elements of travel preferences to illustrate the structure, including two personality traits; three environmental attitude factors and car pride; and two perceptual factors of convenience and comfort. A MIMIC model quantifies the eight factors and examines the relationships among these factors as well as between them and socioeconomic variables. Despite the significant correlations with socioeconomic variables, personality, attitudes and perceptions prove to be characteristics of individuals that are distinct from the socioeconomics. The dissertation presents three applications that incorporate these latent factors into travel demand analysis of three critical aspects of travel behavior: car use, mode choice and car ownership. Incorporating the latent variables significantly improves the overall exploratory power of the transportation models.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Zhao, Jinhua, 1977-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Joseph Ferreira Jr.

• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/54221

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/54221