Socioeconomic Development and Urban Public Transit Ridership in China: Panel Data Model Based Empirical Analysis

Based on the vast body of literature on the research of public transit ridership, this paper first constructs a refined but practical research methodology in an analytical way, which then is immediately applied to the empirical analysis in China. With 11-year data on public transit usage and socioeconomic development of 30 Chinese capital cities, a cross-section fixed effects panel data model is specified and estimated to examine the impacts of socioeconomic development on public transit usage in the context of the speedy urbanization in China. Population, gross domestic product, individual income and service quantity are selected as the external influencing factors from the policymakeri¯s concentrations. The elasticities of the variables for corresponding influencing factors derived from the regressed equations have finally indicated that population in the urban area (0.35) as well as the number of bus vehicles in service (0.40) contributes most to the usage of public transit, followed by GDP (0.17) and annual disposable income per capita (0.12). The city specific difference of public transit usage is also confirmed via the discovery that the coefficients of city specific dummies varies. To prove the applicability of the model, it is validated with data of the year 2009, and the results show that the model are quite satisfying since 20 out of the total 30 cities have the gap between their actual transit ridership and the predicted amount fall into the range of (-10%, 10%), and the reasons of larger errors are further explained.