Investigating Dominant Trip Distance for Intercity Passenger Transport Mode Using Large-Scale Location-Based Service Data

Abstract

Intercity transport systems have been plagued by low efficiency and overutilization for a long time, due to unhealthy competition among multi-transport modes. Hence, this study aims to estimate the dominant trip distance of intercity passenger transport modes to optimize the allocation of intercity passenger transport resources and improve the efficiency of intercity transport systems. Dominant trip distance was classified into two types: Absolute dominant trip distance and relative dominant trip distance; and their respective models were developed using passenger transport mode share functions and fitting curves. Particularly, the big data of intercity passenger transport mode share rate of more than 360 cities in China was obtained using a network crawler and each passenger transport mode share function and their curves were proposed. Furthermore, the dominant trip distances estimation models of intercity passenger transport were developed and solved. The results show that there are significant differences in dominant trip distance between the transport modes. For example, the absolute and relative dominant trip distances of highway are 8–119 km and 8–463 km, respectively, while those of airway are 1594–3000 km and 2477–3000 km, respectively.