A Longitudinal Study on the Linkage between Public Transport Demand and Land Use Characteristics: A Pseudo Panel Approach

Abstract

This study applies a pseudo panel approach to analyse public transport demand in the Sydney Greater Metropolitan Area (SGMA). A public transport demand model is constructed to incorporate two factors that have been highlighted in the literature of travel behaviour but still under-researched, which are: (i) the temporal effect of demand adjustment; and (ii) the land use characteristics of the built environment. The research gaps in previous applied pseudo panel data research including estimation techniques and issues involved with the applications to public transport are identified and addressed in this study. The pseudo panel approach allows for the identification of long-term demand changes using repeated cross-sectional data, which are collected at an individual level with detailed travel-related information and geographical information. This study constructs static and dynamic pseudo panel data models to analyse public transport demand in terms of its associations with price, socio-economic factors,level of public transport service, and land use factors. The research findings identify the significant determinants of public transport demand in the SGMA, with a distinction between short-run and long-run demand elasticities. This suggests a timeframe of 2.13 years is required to reach the long-run demand equilibrium. The estimated demand elasticities are used to forecast demand for the SGMA with validated results supporting the applicability of the public transport model based on the pseudo panel data. The main contribution of this thesis is the identification of long-run public transport demand elasticities using a pseudo panel dataset created from existing repeated cross-sectional household travel survey data which uses more individual information than aggregate data. This approach enables a longitudinal analysis in the absence of genuine panel data, and this in turn provides important implications for urban public transport planning and policy formulation.