Sociodemographic Groups and Mode Choice in a Middle-Sized European City

This paper studies the transportation mode choice and the travel behaviors of different sociodemographic groups in a middle-sized European city. Data were extracted from an extensive origin–destination survey (10,092 individuals and 28,225 trips) conducted in Trieste, Italy, in 2002 and 2003. Gender, age, employment, and vehicle availability are important variables influencing transportation mode choice. These variables were explicitly introduced in the utility function of a random utility model, the multinomial logit model. The proposed model allows the effects of the different transportation planning initiatives on different socio-demographic groups to be evaluated. The effects of any transportation initiative may not affect the population as a whole and can be quite different for each sociodemographic group. These differences should be considered in assessments of any transportation planning process for two reasons: they improve the performance of the policy design phase and they increase the predictability of the effects caused by the transportation scenario chosen. Hence, the introduction of sociodemographic variables within a transportation mode choice model should be aimed not only at improving the statistical evaluation of the model but also at increasing its descriptive potential.