Modeling of Travel Behavior in Budapest: Leisure Travelers

Abstract

People usually travel with different preferences to reach the location of their leisure activities, where transport mode is a decisive factor. Previous studies focus on developing discrete choice models for people where a trip purpose is considered as an explanatory variable. In this paper, discrete choice modeling is applied to model the behavior of leisure travelers, to understand the impact of several factors on the transport mode choice, such as sociodemographic variables. A sample of 1100 travelers from a household survey in Budapest is used in the analysis. The sample includes the daily activity plans of leisure travelers and their sociodemographic as well as economic characteristics. A Multinomial Logit (MNL) model is applied, where the data are examined across travel time variables and travel characteristics, such as travel time, travel cost, age, gender, income, and car ownership. The developed models are used to predict the probability of using the different transport modes based on the characteristics of the travelers and their trips. The model indicates that time and the cost impact travel negatively. While other variables show varied impacts on the transport mode selection. The output of this study is important for decision-makers to understand the patterns of leisure tips in a city.