The influence of exogenous factors on train demand in the UK

Abstract This paper presents findings from an extensive analysis of UK National Travel Survey (NTS) to understand and quantify factors influencing the demand for train travel. Specifically, discrete choice models were developed from NTS data (1995-2014) to understand and quantify how different socio-economic factors influence the train demand. The models are structured to understand two issues related to train demand: who are train users and how many trips train users make. Models were estimated for three travel purposes: commute, business and other travel. To further understand the variation in train trip making by geography, particularly to account for the dominance of train trips to and from London, separate models, for each purpose, were estimated for train trips originating or ending in London and for train trips originating and ending elsewhere. The impact of various socio-economic characteristics and time-trend effects on train trip rates is presented in this work. The models obtained from the NTS data are able to enrich train forecasting performance in three ways: they improve the historic evidence on independent variables influencing train demand, they provide demand parameters for use in forecasting as well as quantifying better the socio-economic trends driving train demand.