Developing Commuters’ Transportation Alternative Choice Model in Seoul Mobility-as-a-Service

Abstract

Mobility as a service (MaaS), which integrates information of travel modes and its related services into a single platform, has generated considerable recent attention and research interest owing to its convenience. Recently Korean government planned to launch the MaaS which integrates existing and innovative mobility services by providing booking and payment through a single application, thus provides convenient, seamless travel experience to domestic people. Although many researchers anticipate MaaS will bring a shift from car-centric to transit-centric mobility pattern, it is also possible that MaaS increase ridership of fossil-fuel vehicle. Understanding the impact of MaaS on people’s choice behavior beforehand is critical to successfully implement MaaS and to minimize social disorder. Thus, the objective of our research is to investigate user preference to transport alternatives available in the MaaS system. We conducted a stated choice experiment with five alternatives including mode combinations and obtained 1,556 valid samples. We developed two separate nested logit models which can assuage independence of irrelevant alternatives problems. Each model showed satisfying results in that the values of robust r-square were 0.297, 0.310, respectively. Finally, we revealed how socio-economic variables, workplace variables affect the preference of each nested structure. The results of this paper will be helpful to platform operators when building marketing strategies and designing a customized travel mode recommendation system.