Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:

Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

Transportation Research Board annual meeting January 2014

Success Factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green

Communities

Authors

Claus DOLL (corresponding author)

Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI
Breslauer Str. 48, 76139 Karlsruhe, GERMANY
T: +49 721 6809-354, F: +49 721 6809-135
E: claus.doll@isi.fraunhofer.de

Lucia MEJIA-DORANTES
Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI, GERMANY
E: lucia.mejia-dorantes@isi.fraunhofer.de

Timur SHAYKUTDINOV
Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI, GERMANY
E: timur.shaykutdinov@isi.fraunhofer.de

Peter FRECKMANN
Hochschule Karlsruhe, GERMANY
E: peter.freckmann@hs-karlsruhe.de

Abstract:
This paper takes a closer look at the determinants of public transportation demand and the role of
ambient urban and geographical conditions. The hypothesis to be tested is that green and livable
cities entail a higher use of public transport than observed in car-centered cities. However, a look into
time series data for European cities uncovers that past mobility trends have been less in favor of
public transport as a few prominent examples and the vast amount of subsidies flowing into the sector
would suggest. To test this hypothesis, an ordinary least square (OLS) model has been developed in
two phases. First, a simple supply side model has been established, to which in a second phase urban
ambient and geographical variables have been added. For 37 European and five world cities it is
found that green areas and the presence of bicycle parking facilities have a significant and positive
impact on public transport mode share. Looking to world cities the model provides even more positive
impacts of these variables on the model fit than in the case of the European cities. These findings lead
to the recommendation to integrate transport system and wider local land use and development
processes.

Keywords: Public transportation / transit, demand analysis, behavior, urban structure

Date of submission: 1 August 2013

Word count: Text body 7094

Figures + Tables: 7
Word equivalents: 8844
1
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 1 Introduction
2 In western countries public transport in cities played a central role in daily life up to the mid
3 1950s. Traditionally, “balanced communities” were fostered, self-contained, self-sustainable,
4 and self-dependent places, where people could live, work, shop and play (Burby and Weiss,
5 1976). Then the private car arrived. Due to its flexibility and now affordability it quickly
6 occupied road space and turned profitable transit companies into loss-making entities which
7 started depending on public subsidies while providing rudimentary services for those who, for
8 various reasons, were not able to have their own car. Urban structures adapted to this
9 changing face of mobility by fostering sprawl and sub-urbanization, partly encouraged by
10 government policies for “new urban planning”. Lifestyles evolved into arrangements where
11 people would live in one place, work in another and undertake their recreational activities in a
12 third, fourth or even fifth place, often covering long distances to do so (Bertolini and Dijst,
13 2003). Serving these large residential and activity areas by collective transport was then
14 even harder. This trend, which dominated the thinking of planners throughout the 1970s and
15 1980s, was more expressed in North America than in Western Europe. Nevertheless, also in
16 European cities the trend towards suburbanization and remote shopping locations has
17 challenged the prevalent concept of compact cities.

18 A look into the literature reveals that since the 1980s several works on both sides of
19 the Atlantic have been published on transport mode choice and in particular on the success
20 factors of public transport. As the explanatory power of most models, which mainly
21 concentrated on system supply and user characteristics, has not been overwhelmingly good,
22 this paper includes descriptors of the environment, within which people live and travel into
23 the equation. Our hypothesis is: the less car oriented the urban fabric becomes the more
24 people will use public transport for daily commuting, shopping and leisure trips.

25 This paper addresses researchers in behavioral sciences and transport modeling, as

26 well as higher level urban planners and decision-makers by offering a strategic view on the
27 sensitivity of the success of local public transport systems with respect to ambient conditions,
28 quality of life and urban fabric. Although our statistical analyses concentrate on European
29 conurbations, the conclusions can be considered universal for global medium-sized cities, as
30 a data for selected cases from the Americas and Asia confirm.

31 The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces the policy relevance of the
32 subject. Afterwards, section 3 highlights insights from literature on determinants for public
33 transport use. Section 4 then introduces the statistical model and data sources before
34 Section 5 presents its results. Finally, Section 6 discusses the findings and concludes the
35 paper.

36

2
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 2 Current Status of Public Transportation Development:

2 An European and International Perspective

3 2.1 Urban sprawl and transport externalities

4 In transport sciences the link between urban sprawl, settlement structures and mobility
5 behavior is well recognized. Dieleman and Wegener (2004) and Farber and Páez (2011),
6 among others, argue that increased mobility, mainly by private car, is a direct consequence
7 of suburbanization and the spatial division of labor, compounded by the lack of strong
8 planning interventions at the regional and local level which increase the probability of urban
9 de-concentration. And while previously these changes were seen by urban planners as the
10 ‘natural expansion’ of metropolitan areas, increasingly urban sprawl is seen as an
11 undesirable and unsustainable pattern for urban living (Ewing, 2008), that tends to outstretch
12 the fabric of the urban area and undermine people’s quality of life.

13 Among the negative effects of sprawl, there are a number of social, economic, and
14 environmental externalities, including an increased need to travel and lengthening journey
15 distances that are not always accompanied by greater accessibility (Morency et al. 2011;
16 Páez et al. 2010a; Páez et al. 2010b). More time spent travelling by larger segments of the
17 public also increases energy consumption and related CO2 emissions (Chester, Horvath and
18 Madanat, 2010). All these facts contribute to the lessening of urban quality and they are
19 problems that our urban areas need to confront. In this respect, the Shanghai Manual (2010)
20 postulates that those cities ranking at the top of surveys measuring urban quality of life have
21 high quality urban transport systems that prioritize public transport and non-motorized
22 modes.

23 As mentioned by Bachand-Marleau et al. (2011) there is a recognized need to tackle these

24 topics in North America, where research on these issues is relatively scarce. For example,
25 Lethco et al. (2009) provide an interesting discussion on New York City Lower Manhattan’s
26 new development, which presented an invaluable opportunity to provide residents with
27 greener transport modes and a better urban environment. In their study they cited European
28 examples of good practices.

29 Against this background we can formulate the major advantages of more public transport for
30 communities and the society in general (compare Doll et al., 2013):
31  Energy and Environment: When fully occupied, energy consumption per passenger
32 kilometer may be only 20% of that of private cars occupied by the driver only (Essen et al.,
33 2011). Given that in European cities roughly one third of transport demand is within and
34 around agglomeration areas, this figure is relevant in terms of the security of energy
35 supply and climate change. The greenhouse gas reduction potential is even higher as
36 electricity for powering public transportation vehicles may be generated largely from
37 renewable sources in the medium future which is also in line with the recent Canadian
38 studies by Zahabi et al., (2013).
39  Economic and financial efficiency: Vivier and Pourbaix (2006) show that those world cities
40 which spend least on transport per inhabitant have the highest share of public transport.
3
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 The main reasons are the space requirement and road maintenance needs of individual
2 car travel. In addition, UITP (2012) and Doll et al. (2013) show that investments in public
3 transport create more jobs than road investments and the automotive industry, and thus
4 larger modal shifts from car to public transport do not threaten economic growth.
5  Accessibility: It is among the major arguments in favor of public transport. This is in
6 particular the case as in many European countries, but also worldwide (Japan, China), the
7 share of elderly and thus mobility restricted people will rise sharply in the coming decades.
8 Moreover, this group will not be capable of affording high fares. To prevent massive
9 burdens for communal households, accessibility needs to be considered as an integral
10 element of making public transport attractive for all users (ECMT/UITP, 2004).
11  Health: with the Health Economic Assessment Tool (HEAT) of the WHO (Kahlmeier et al.,
12 2011) the positive impacts of additional physical activity on life expectancy can be
13 quantified. To a lesser extent access to and from public transport stations can reduce
14 cardio-vascular diseases and stimulate personal well-being. Additional impacts will arise
15 for the public health system and for employers due to less absenteeism and presenteeism
16 as peoples’ immune system is strengthened. In Doll et al. (2013) we have shown that
17 main impacts arise as PT users tend to cycle and walk more frequently than typical car
18 users.
19  Safety: Public transport is the safest mode of travel. In transport statistics we can only find
20 few severely injured or killed passengers of buses, trams, metro or light rail trains. Thus,
21 when following the zero fatality vision (EC, 2011) a high share of public transport in cities
22 and in inter-urban travel is indispensible. According to German statistics the risk of being
23 killed or severely injured is 20 times higher in cars than in trains, tramways or buses
24 (DeStatis 2011).

25 A model forecast on behalf of the German Environment Agency (Doll et al., 2013)
26 demonstrates the potentially high benefits of more active mobility for reducing private costs
27 and for improving personal health. These are several 1000 Euros per year and former car
28 drivers now cycle, walk or use public transport. Safety effects of more active mobility are
29 found to be rather neutral as fewer cars on the road but higher individual risks of cyclists and
30 pedestrians about equal out. The only critical issue is time loss. But the study concludes that
31 due to an increasing frequency of stress and burn out current assessment schemes for the
32 value of travel time savings are to be re-visited. This short reflection shows that more public
33 transport in combination with other forms of active mobility is beneficial for the individual,
34 communities and the national economy as a whole.

35 2.2 Success of public transport policies in Europe

36 The social and private monetary benefits of public transport over car travel have been known
37 for at least two decades, and European transport strategies since then have postulated the
38 objective of supporting rail and public transport. Without going into detail here we look at the
39 success of these efforts in European cities.

40 In its 2011 Transport White Paper (EC, 2011) the European Commission envisages halving
41 the number of fossil fuel powered vehicles in European cities by 2030 and their complete ban
42 by 2050. This vision is associated with a sharp decline in private car use, which shall be
4
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 reached by making cities greener and more livable. “Green” and “livable” here in fact means
2 more green areas in the city as well as more sustainable consumption patterns, including
3 transport. Users shall be made more aware of car use by economic and regulatory
4 measures. In intercity travel the roadmap further envisages a share of 50 percent of medium
5 distance trips by rail.

6 For world cities the International Association of Public Transport (UITP) has recently
7 launched the “2025 = PT x 2” strategy (UITP, 2012). To increase PT shares of urban trips
8 from currently around 10% to 15% in most medium-sized to large cities to 30% within the
9 relatively short time frame of 12 years from now, the UITP proposes a mix of customer
10 orientation, a new business culture for PT undertakings, the exploitation of demand
11 management tools, the work with urban transport visions and – of course – more stable
12 funding conditions.

13 These are big visions assuming a fundamental change of mobility cultures in cities. To
14 reduce car dependency in European cities a great number of projects have been launched
15 by the European Commission and national governments. Prominent examples are the re-
16 vitalization of tramways in many French cities, the rapid implementation or extension of
17 cycling infrastructures in Spain, France and the UK and various mobility management
18 initiatives on the communal and company level. But how successful have these attempts
19 been in the past? To answer this question we have looked at three trans-European
20 databases: the Eurostat Urban Audit Database (Eurostat 2013), the Eruopean Platform on
21 Mobility Management (EPOMM 2013) and the Mobility in Cities Database by UITP (Vivier
22 and Pourbaix 2006). While the databases are introduced in more detail in Section 4, we will
23 briefly discuss their findings on public transport mode share development in Europe in the
24 following paragraphs.

25 The Eurostat Urban Audit database delivers multi annual data for 146 out of 350
26 datasets from the EU, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey. The results are rather disillusioning.
27 Despite enormous efforts by countries, cities and communities in Europe to foster non-car
28 based mobility during the past two decades, the majority of monitored cities either show no
29 significant change or even saw an increase in car usage for commuting trips. However, the
30 Urban Audit database does not provide modal share data for some of the major European
31 agglomerations, such as London or Paris. Second, the database does not report on private
32 and leisure trips, which represent quite a big share of the cake. Finally, economic growth in
33 this period may just have been stronger than the cities’ success in increasing public transport
34 patronage.

35 Across all conurbations contained in the UITP Mobility in Cities Database (MCD, the
36 comparison between the 2001 original indicators and the previous data referring to 1995
37 comes to a similar result as the evaluation of the Eurostat Urban Audit database. Public
38 transport trip rate per inhabitant remained stable at 360 journeys per inhabitant and year,
39 while – due to overall growing traffic volumes – the share of public transport slightly declined
40 from 31.5% to 30.6%. At the same time, the cities investigated largely sprawled and car

5
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 ownership rates increased by around 11%. The divergence in public transport use is
2 remarkable, ranging from only 6% to 74% in Hong Kong for all daily trips (Vivier and
3 Pourbaix, 2006).

4 The European Platform on Mobility database (EPOMM) eventually paints a more

5 positive picture. The 41 datasets which have information for the period 2000-2004 as well as
6 for 2007-2012 reveal that there are more cities with increasing- than with decreasing PT
7 market share. This positive trend becomes even more pronounced when weighing the cities
8 by population numbers. In particular the bigger cities with moderate modal split growth
9 (Vienna, Rennes) shift the population weighted curve to the right. While we find several very
10 positive developments in medium-sized western European cities (Oslo, Wuppertal, Espoo),
11 the far outliers contain the Paris metropolitan area (+14%) and Sheffield (+17%). The
12 reasons for these developments have not been tracked in this paper, but may well be at least
13 partly due to methodological changes in defining or measuring mode share values. Figure 1
14 shows the values found in the EPOMM database.

15

16 Figure 1: PT mode share development in selected European cities

Changes in PT mode share in European cities

2000-2004 to 2007-2012
3000 12
Frankfurt (DE), Trondheim (NO)

Karlsruhe (DE), Stavanger (NO)

2500 10
Espoo (FI), Vitoria-Gast. (ES)

Grenoble (FR), Bolzano (IT)

Cumulative population

Sofia (BG), Augsburg (DE)

Vienna (AT), Rennes (FR)

Oslo (NO), Aölmere (NL)

Malmo (SE), Wuppertal

2000 8

Number of cities
Basel (CH), Vilnius (LT)

Stuttgart, Leipzig (DE)

Bergen, Tromse (NO)

(in '000)

1500 6
Sheffield (UK)
Helsinki (FI)

1000 4
Paris (FR)

500 2

0 0
-5 -4 -3 -2 -1 +/-0 +1 +2 +3 +4 +5 +6/+7 +14 +17
Change in PT mode share (%) No of cities Population
17
18 Source: own compilation with data from EPOMM (2013)

19

20 These quick assessments impressively highlight the gap between policy targets and
21 the reality of urban mobility in European cities. Despite very good examples of successful
22 and sustainable urban policies, the benefits of active mobility including cycling, walking and
23 public transportation, need to be communicated in a more proactive way and its drivers need
24 to be better understood in order to achieve the necessary change in the mindsets of
25 policymakers, planners, public transport companies and – of course citizens.

26

6
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 3 Review of determinants of PT demand

2 We now conclude this review section by looking into evidence of drivers for public transport
3 demand found in the literature. The assessment of factors determining peoples’ choice for a
4 particular mode of transport dates back to the early years of building mass transit systems.
5 Early models of travel choice assumed a rather deterministic decision-making process based
6 on measurable indicators like travel time and costs. For instance Wallin and Wright (1974)
7 reviewed basic research at several US universities on the topic. They resulted in the
8 following 7 6 target categories of travel mode choice, listed in descending order of
9 importance:
10  Travel time
11  Reliability
12  Convenience
13  Status
14  Comfort
15  Cost

16 Finding costs in the position of least importance appears remarkable. However,

17 looking at the dominance of the private car in day-to-day mobility patterns in most world
18 regions with its high investment, maintenance and operating costs, this finding becomes
19 more obvious. With cost and time parameters we generally face the problem of hidden
20 elements. Particularly in car travel private decisions are often made on the basis of out-of-
21 pocket costs and direct travel times. Capital investments, regular maintenance, time spent on
22 servicing and operating the car are largely ignored (Canzler 2009).

23 Another way of confirming the ranking by Wallin and Wright (1974) are the trials of
24 free public transport currently undertaken in several French cities and the urban congestion
25 charging zones in London (UK), Stockholm (Sweden) and Milan (Italy). These examples
26 indicate that there is of course a considerable price elasticity of demand and mode choice,
27 but this is not infinitely high and is closely connected to service qualities. Free public
28 transport brought about 50% to 300% more customers (Rubens, 2013) and the congestion
29 charges brought about a 20% reduction in demand for traffic entering the charging zone
30 (Banister et al., 2007). The acceleration of public transport, short headways, customer-
31 oriented information systems and convenient (trendy) vehicles prove to be much more
32 successful: i.e. the improvement of bus reliability increased by 30%, waiting times decreased
33 and speeds rose by 16% in the London charging zone, making most former car drivers
34 switch to public transport (Banister et al, 2007).

35 This deterministic way of thinking, which blinds out the existence of the individual
36 freedom of choice, was replaced in the 1980s by the appearance of behavioral travel choice
37 models. For Germany, Held (1980) arrived at 24 target categories, determined after 54
38 expert interviews and 23 intensive interviews. Next to the measurable factors travel time,
39 reliability and costs the list contains personal mode choice factors such as curiosity, desire
7
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 for physical activity, joy of risk, environmental concerns, social contact, privacy protection,
2 power and aggression, etc.

3 The EC-funded research project USEmobility (2013) has approached the question of
4 success factors for public transport by interviewing 12,900 citizens in six European countries,
5 who have recently changed their mobility patterns. It was found that peoples’ mode choice
6 decisions are much more dynamic than commonly expected. 40% of users state that they
7 take pragmatic decisions and 30% are aware of multi-modal solutions to cover the “first and
8 last mile”. Changing mobility behavior, changes in life situation, e.g. new job, relocation or
9 family related issues are found to be essential. Besides these trigger factors, hard supply
10 characteristics, in particular accessibility, costs, journey time, waiting times, number of
11 transfers and frequency, are found to dominate peoples’ decisions. Soft supply side
12 characteristics are less relevant. Flexibility, planning effort, availability of information and
13 environmental friendliness are stated as most important, followed by comfort, atmosphere
14 and staff. Figure 2 presents the relevance of factors which make people switch from cars to
15 public transport and vice versa. The figure presents push out factors (left), which drive
16 people to use less public transport (PUB), as well as pull in factors (right), which attract
17 people to PT. Interestingly, most factors are as well responsible for and against PT use to a
18 relatively equal degree. E.g. costs of PT may be too high for those people who have access
19 to a car anyway, while they are in favor of PT in case they can get rid of their vehicle. Clearly
20 located on one side or another is the environmental perception mainly in favor of PT and
21 atmosphere and social contacts, which appear problematic for collective transport at large.

22

8
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 Figure 2: Ranking of factors in favor and against public transport use - results of the
2 USEmobility survey

3
4 PUB = public transport; Source: USEmobility (2013).

6 We can continue this way of thinking by suspecting that the travel choice of people is
7 not only determined by the rational and emotional properties of the transport alternatives, the
8 personal situation, type of trip and character of the traveler, but also by the culture and the
9 environment, in which she or he lives or on its perception and satisfaction (Van Acker et al.,
10 2010; Plasschaert, 2013; Klinger et al., 2013).

11
12 4 The public transport demand model
13 In this section we describe the architecture of the statistical model used to identify the more
14 general determinants of public transport demand. As mode share is influenced by a multitude
15 of impacts we delve into urban mobility data and demand analysis before turning our
16 attention to urban quality of life indicators.

17 4.1 Urban mobility data

18 In a first step we need to decide on a dataset of urban transport demand and supply. There
19 are three potential candidates for available pan-European mobility databases:

9
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1  The Eurostat Urban Audit Database: An attempt to establish a comparable database

2 of European and foreign cities with multi-annual data covering a wide variety of topics
3 is made by Eurostat’s Urban Audit dataset. It covers 350 cities and agglomeration
4 areas in the 28 EU Member States, Switzerland and Norway (EUR30) plus 27 cities in
5 Turkey. In 11 themes, indicators back to 1989 in five time segments of three to five
6 years are provided. The data tables further distinguish between the core city area and
7 the larger urban zone. Out of the 350 datasets provided, we get 166 records with
8 modal split data for more than one time slice. These may be just two consecutive
9 periods, two more distant periods or multiple data (Eurostat, 2013).
10  MCD: The Mobility in Cities Database was created by the International Association
11 for Public Transport (UITP) with the aim of compiling a dataset which describes urban
12 mobility in European and world cities in a comparable format. The 52 conurbations of
13 the database are mainly located in Europe (45) developed or transition countries
14 worldwide (Australia, USA, China, Singapore, Brazil, United Arabic Emirates and
15 Tunisia). 144 indicators are compiled into 10 themes covering all modes, transport
16 network assets and social data. Data of the MCD database is available for 2001, and
17 information of the previous “Millenium Sustainability Indicators” database, also created
18 by UITP, is provided for comparison (Vivier and Pourbaix, 2006).
19  The European Platform on Mobility Management (EPOMM) provides a trans-
20 national data source on activities in the Member States and operates the TRMS tool
21 with modal split indicators for 350 cities in Europe. For all cities links to the original data
22 sources and comments on methodology are provided and, if available, multi-annual
23 data is posted (EPOMM 2013). However, the indicators are not unified in terms of
24 urban boundaries or methods of measurement, i.e. in most cases it remains unclear
25 whether the modal split refers to the main mode (as in the case of MCD and the
26 Eurostat Urban Audit) or to single elements of trip chains.

27 All of these datasets have their specific pros and cons. The number of usable, i.e.
28 complete and consistent, indicators is highest in EPOMM, but this source disqualifies itself as
29 it provides only modal share data with the above mentioned problems. The urban audit
30 database provides a huge number of observations and indicators, but in most cases data
31 refers to the core cities only, which is not consistent and suitable for analyzing mobility
32 trends. Moreover, we have to mix data from several years to arrive at the reported number of
33 146 usable datasets. Thus, although the 2001 data provided by MCD is very old and the
34 number of 44 usable datasets is rather small, we select MCD due to the high level of
35 consistency of the datasets.

10
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 Table 1: Comparison of pan-European datasets

Criterion Eurostat Urban Audit UITP Mobility in European Platform

Database Cities Database for Mobility
(MCD) Management
(EPOMM), TERMS
Total number of 374 57 350
datasets (incl. Turkey) (incl. 7 world cities) (steadily growing)
Usable number of 146 44 350
datasets (with different years) (incl. 7 world cities)
Year 1989 – 2011 2011 2002 - 2012
Level of completeness medium high high
Regional boundaries core city & larger Agglomeration areas unclear
zones for selected
cities
Indicators >150 112 4
Themes Demography, Demography, finance, Modal split only
education, health transport, environment
environment, economy,
transport, etc.
Consistency Medium High Low

2 Source: own compilation

3 As cities within and outside Europe are structurally different, we generate two models:
4 we calibrate a European model with 37 cities and then apply this to a worldwide model with
5 the total number of 44 cities. We create these first with indicators from MCD and in a second
6 step add data on urban structures to check whether these improve the explanatory power of
7 the model.

8 4.2 Model structure and selection of variables

9 The model to be developed in this section shall explain the use of public transport by looking
10 at PT supply side and urban design variables. We selected the variable “Daily trips by public
11 transport per 1000 inhabitants” as independent, i.e. target, variable as we considered this
12 somewhat more reliable than classical modal split variables.

13 The 120 indicators of the MCD database are organized in 15 themes. Based on the
14 literature review (Section 3) we have pre-selected six themes of which we can assume that
15 they contain powerful variables for explaining the use of public transport. These are:
16 1. Background information on the city
17 2. Road transport infrastructure
18 3. Road traffic demand
19 4. Public transport supply
20 5. Benchmarking of private motorized and public transport
21 6. Public transport productivity and operating costs
11
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 For each theme we selected two independent variables, which were tested in various
2 combinations in the statistical regression model. Out of these we identified the two most
3 robust and significant variables to form the very simple supply side model consisting of two
4 independent variables. We found that the significance, and sometimes even the sign, of
5 variables quickly change when others are added or removed from the model. Another
6 surprising result was that, against intuition, city size and city density did not matter much.
7 This is because the question whether public transport is a suitable alternative to walking,
8 cycling and using the private car is most relevant for rather small towns, which are not
9 represented in the MCD database. Moreover, we calibrated the model with European cities
10 only, which are rather similar in density compared to world agglomerations.

11 Because of several advantages, e.g. integration of variables with very different value
12 ranges or the simplicity of interpretation of results, we chose the double log form for the
13 model (compare Kinnucan et al., 1992 or Alston et al., 2002). In order not to over-fit the
14 model (Hair et al. 1995) we limited the number of independent, i.e. explanatory, variables to
15 four. This of course limits the number of potential drivers of public transport demand
16 drastically. As these four independent variables include the ambient urban structure variables
17 to be added later, we decided to use two variables for describing PT quality of supply.

18 Although the overall model fit would be best if we consider all PT supply side and
19 ambient urban structure variables simultaneously, we decided for a two step approach. This
20 is because we finally want to test explicitly the explanatory power of urban characteristics.
21 Estimating a simplified PT quality model and then extending it by urban structure variables
22 appears to be an appropriate way to achieve this objective.

23 The best fit was finally obtained for the variables public transport vehicle kilometers
24 per urban hectare (Ptv_urb) and the per kilometer car to PT monetary user cost, including
25 fuel, wear, parking, taxes and tickets (C_mt_pt). This result of the pairwise regression
26 assessment pretty well reflects the suggestions made by the literature:
27 1. The number of PT vehicle kilometers per urban hectare represents the density of
28 supply, and thus approximates the distance to the nearest PT station, waiting time and
29 / or the availability of direct connections.
30 2. The car to PT cost ratio directly reflects the travel costs, contained in the short list of
31 important PT success factors.

32 The full set of variables considered from the MCD database and their mutual inter-
33 dependence is presented in the scatter plot in Figure 3. The regression results will be shown
34 together with the spatial parameters in Section 5.

12
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 Figure 3: Scatter plot of MCD variables considered for the model setup

Variables:

popul Population
gdp_inh GDP per inhabitant
park_sp Parking spaces per 1000 jobs in the CBD
ptv_urb Total public transport vehicle km / urban hectare
ptv_inh Total public transport vehicles / mill. inhabitants
recov_raRecovery rate of PT operating expenditure by
farebox revenue
c_mt_pt Cost of one private motorized passenger / average
cost of one public transport passenger km
pas_km Annual PT passenger kilometers per inhabitant

2
3 Source: own computations

4 4.3 Generation of geographical indicators

5 The geographical data were extracted from shapefiles sharing different themes of cities from
6 cloudmade.com (2013). City boundaries are defined by the Eurostat nomenclature for
7 territorial statistics (NUTS), level 6. The identification and download procedure was
8 supported by selection tools available in the ArcGIS geographical software package. Finally,
9 the correctness of the city boundary identification was verified with already existing base
10 maps from OpenStreetMap. Some cities had to be edited manually as no pre-defined shape
11 files were available.

12 After the boundaries had been set, the share of green areas, the share of water
13 areas, bike rental facilities, bike parking places and accommodation facilities were picked
14 automatically from OpenStreetMap data. To accelerate this time consuming process, the
15 Model Builder with iterators within ArcGIS was programmed. Since we are not able to
16 capture intrinsic cultural characteristics, we used the cities’ latitude as a spatial variable,
17 which in other studies is also regarded as submarkets (Bourassa et al. 2003, Mejia-Dorantes,
18 et al., 2011).

19 Out of these geographical and city structure variables, the two ones explaining best
20 the use of public transport were the share of green areas within the urban built-up area
21 (Perc_green_area) and the number of bike parking facilities (Bike_parking). The data did not

13
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 show a systematic bias of PT use with latitude, which rejects the hypothesis of a cultural or
2 climate impact on mode choice in European cities. Results are given in Section 5.

3
4 5 Model outputs

5 5.1 Performance of the European model

6 Table 2 presents the regression results for the European city model in its simple form without
7 geographical and city structure variables (left) and in the extended form with these features
8 (right). Significance values are close to zero for all variables indicating them all as important
9 for explaining PT use. The variance inflation factor (VIF), which should be well below 7.5 as a
10 rule of thumb, ranges around two in all cases. All variables can thus be considered
11 sufficiently independently.

12 When looking at the model coefficients we can observe that the impact of the relative
13 cost variable C_mt_pt totally drops from 129 to 0.5 when green areas and bike parking
14 places enter the model. The storyline around that finding could be that in green cities with a
15 high density bicycle parking facilities the probability for strict parking management is high,
16 and thus these three variables are to some extent co-linear. However, the VIF values do not
17 indicate this.

18 Table 2: Regression results for the simple and the extended model

Variable Simple model without Extended model with

geographical and city structure geographical and city structure
indicators indicators
Coefficient P-Value VIF Coefficient P-Value VIF
Intercept -256,34 0,24 - 1,56 0,01* -
Ptv_urb 0,33 0* 1,05 0,6 0* 1,47
C_mt_pt 128,7 0* 1,05 0,47 0* 1,07
Bike_parking 0,1 0* 1,07
Perc_green_area 0,13 0* 1,38
Ordinary least square diagnostics – model performance
Multiple R-Squared 0,90 0,89
Adjusted R-Squared 0,87 0,88
AIC 524,26 -1,59
Koenker Statistic 0,304 0,29
Jarque-Bera 0,446 0,000019*
Statistic

19 * = highly relevant variable; VIF = variance inflation factor (should be below 7.5, esri.com, 2013);
20 source: own computation

21

14
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 The performance of the models is expressed by the adjusted R-squared measure as

2 it is independent of the number of variables. Values close to 1 express a high explanatory
3 power of the model. We see that both models are powerful, but the performance improves
4 slightly when including the geographical variables.

5 As another proof of significance of the model a residual map within ArcGIS was
6 produced. The residuals are represented by their standard deviations revealed with different
7 colors on the map. This approach of mapping the residuals gives the visual representation of
8 how the unexplained share of PT demand distributes geographically. Table 2 shows the
9 residuals for the European model. They are well distributed over space, which suggests that
10 there is no systematic spatial bias with respect to the prevailing simplicity of the model.
11

12 Figure 4: Residual map of the extended model with geographical indicators

13
14 Legend: green = over-estimation; red = under-estimation of PT use.
15 Source: own computation

16 5.2 Including world cities

17 In a final step we include the seven world cities Chicago, Dubai, Melbourne, Hong
18 Kong, Singapore, Moscow and Sao Paolo into the model. As mapping the results is not
19 possible on that scale, we show the goodness of the resulting model by plots of computed
20 over observed PT use in the cities. The left graph represents the model based on the two
21 independent variables “relative private costs to car use” and “PT vehicle kilometers per
22 hectare”. The graphs reveal that the inclusion of “green areas” and “bike parking facilities” in
23 the right graph pulls the European, and in particular the seven world cities (with the
24 exception of Moscow) closer together and moves the regression line closer to the 45° axis.

15
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 Figure 5: Plots of observed versus predicted PT modal shares with the global model without
2 and with geographical indicators

Global model results without geographical variables Global model results with geographical variables
9.0
Moscow 9.0
Moscow
Hong Kong
8.5
8.5
Singapore
Estimated PT supply (PT-vkm / ha)

Estimated PT supply (PT-vkm / ha)

Warsaw Warsaw
8.0
Sao Paolo 8.0
Singapore
Barcelona
7.5 Barcelona Hong Kong
7.5
Hamburg
Sao Paolo
Bologna
7.0 Lille
7.0 Hamburg

6.5 Dubai Lille

6.5
Melbourne
Chicago Bologna Melbourne
Dubai
6.0
6.0 6.5 7.0 7.5 8.0 8.5 9.0 6.0 Chicago
6.0 6.5 7.0 7.5 8.0 8.5 9.0
Actual PT supply from MCD database (PT-vkm / ha)
3 Actual PT supply from MCD database (PT-vkm / ha)

4 Source: own compilation

5 Both cases are based on parameter estimates for the European cities; the world cities
6 serve as a kind of verification data set. The results suggest that the European coefficients
7 serve surprisingly well to describe the PT use in very different global agglomerations.

8
9 6 Discussion and Conclusions
10 Looking at RTD programs, project results and stakeholder communications we get the
11 impression that Europe today is a test field of successful green mobility and public transport
12 implementation. However, by looking at data from various European entities one must
13 remain more cautious of the success of market interventions. Statistical evidence goes from
14 a “moderate increase in PT market shares” to “no major change” to even a “slight increase in
15 car use for commuting”. Although the underlying data is questionable and although we did
16 not dig deep into the reasons for single cities, we should take this trend seriously.

17 The paper has thus looked into the drivers for the use of public transport, including
18 classical supply side characteristics as well as ambient variables on geographical
19 characteristics and urban structures. The supply side analysis confirmed literature findings,
20 according to which private costs (relative to car use), service availability and travel time are
21 more relevant than urban characteristics like average income, city size or PT subsidy levels.
22 However, the relatively small sample size of 37 European cities and the contents of the UITP
23 database did not allow for including all potential determinants of PT market share. Soft
24 factors, such as staff education, security or cleanliness, and personal characteristics of the
25 users were not available. Nevertheless, the regression results show that even with the two
26 variables costs and availability fairly good results were achieved for the European market.

27

28
16
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 The focus of the paper was to check whether urban ambient variables, such as the
2 geographical location, the livability expressed in the share of green and water areas, the
3 cities’ friendliness towards active forms of mobility (expressed in bike parking facilities) and
4 their touristic relevance (in accommodation capacity) provide an additional explanatory
5 power for the use of public transport. The hypothesis formulated in the paper’s introduction
6 assumed a positive relation due to the core role of public transport for the seemingly rising
7 relevance of multi-modal mobility concepts. By testing several combinations of the above
8 listed the regression led to two conclusions:

9 (1) The share of green areas and the number of bike parking places are the most
10 relevant of the tested ambient and geographical variables. We can suspect that their
11 relevance is driven by their close linkage to the quality of life and the amenity of mobility even
12 outside the protected area within the private car. Public transport is commonly considered
13 the backbone of car free mobility styles, providing travel options for longer distances, with
14 heavy luggage or in adverse weather conditions, and thus creates a sound package of
15 alternatives to the private car.

16 (2) Including ambient and geographical variables improve the explanatory power of
17 the simple model of public transport use explained by supply side variables. The intuitive
18 explanation that coincides with the suspicion for the superiority of quality of life and active
19 mobility indicators raised above. The chain of argumentation, however, could also be
20 different, including some co-linearity of variables. One could suspect that cities investing in
21 good public transport systems also are in favor of a more pleasing urban fabric. This would
22 imply that cities consciously or intuitively already consider the inter-relationship between
23 urban environment, active mobility and public transport use. In later research with richer data
24 bases and / or targeted case studies different types of cities should be investigated in detail.

25 (3) In the considered world cities the introduction of ambient and geographical
26 variables helps increasing the model fit much more than for the European cities. We can
27 explain this in two ways. First, public transport system qualities, road transport condition and
28 travel habits around the world are very different from (mainly western) Europe.
29 Consequently, the explanatory power of supply side models is naturally weak and should be
30 improved by adding alternative variables. Second, green cities and space for cycling are both
31 an indicator of less car centered urban structures. We can suspect that, across different
32 levels of PT systems, more green and cycling-friendly cities encourage their citizens to use
33 public transport to complete or supplement mobility chains anywhere in the world.

34 To conclude: livability, although commonly not very sharply defined, appears to be a

35 concept of growing importance for cities to compete for well skilled and high income people.
36 More green areas are certainly an ingredient of livable cities. In most cases this will imply
37 less road space and consequently more space for walking and cycling. The analyses in this
38 paper suggest that more active mobility stimulates the use of public transport and vice versa.

39 The results suggest to closely connect urban transport planning to wider local
40 development and land use planning. Both cannot be considered in isolation as mobility is a
17
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 key feature determining the attractiveness of cities. Examples in Europe and increasingly in
2 the US demonstrate, that providing good alternatives to the car satisfies an increasing
3 number of citizens and helps public transport authorities.

5
6 7 References
7 Alston Julian M., Chalfant James A. and NICHOLAS E. Piggott Nicholas E., 2002. Estimating
8 and testing the compensated double-log demand model. Applied Economics, 2002, 34,
9 1177±1186.

10 Bachand-Marleau, J., J. Larsen, and A. M. El-Geneidy. Much-Anticipated Marriage of Cycling

11 and Transit. In Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation
12 Research Board, No. -1, 2011, pp. 109–117.

13 Banister, D. J. Pucher, and M. Lee-Gosselin (2007) “Making Sustainable Transport Politically

14 and Publicly Acceptable,” in Rietveld, P. and Stough, R., eds., Institutions and
15 Sustainable Transport: Regulatory Reform in Advanced Economies. Cheltenham,
16 England: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 17-50.

17 Bertolini, L. and Dijst, M. (2003) 'Mobility environments and network cities', Journal of Urban
18 Design, 8(1), pp. 27-43.

19 Bourassa, S. C., M. Hoesli, and V. S. Peng. Do housing submarkets really matter? Journal of
20 housing economics, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2003, p. 12.

21 Burby, R.J. and Weiss, S.F. (1976) New Communities USA, Lexington Books.

22 Canzler, W. (2009). Mobilität, Verkehr, Zukunftsforschung. In R. Popp & E. Schüll (eds.),

23 Zukunftsforschung und Zukunftsgestaltung. Beiträge aus Wissenschaft und Praxis,
24 Wissenschaftliche Schriftenreihe „Zukunft und Forschung“, Zentrum fur
25 Zukunftsstudien Salzburg. (vol. 1). Berlin Heildelberg: Springer.

26 Chester, M.V., Horvath, A. and Madanat, S. (2010) 'Comparison of life-cycle energy and
27 emissions footprints of passenger transportation in metropolitan regions', Atmospheric
28 Environment, 44(8), pp. 1071-1079.

29 cloudmade.com (2013): Downloads. Web resource accessed 03.03.2013.

30 URL: http://downloads.cloudmade.com/

31 DeStatis (2011): Verkehr. Verkehrsunfälle 2010 (Traffic, Traffic Accidents 2010). German
32 Federal Office for Statatistics (Statistisches Bundesamt), series 8, volume 7. 3
33 Beteiligte an Straßenverkehrsunfällen 2010.

34 Dieleman, F. and Wegener, M. (2004) 'Compact city and urban sprawl', Built Environment,
35 30(4), pp. 308-323.

18
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 Doll, C., Hartwig, J and Senger, F. (2013): The Private and Public Economics of Sustainable
2 Mobility Patterns. Paper presented at the World Conference on Transport Research
3 (WCTR), July 15th – 18th, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

4 EC (2011): White Paper Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area – Towards a

5 competitive and resource efficient transport system. European Commission
6 COM(2011) 144 final. Brussels

7 ECMT / UITP (2004): Improving Access to Public Transport. European Conference of

8 Ministers of Transport (ECMT) and International Association of Public Transport
9 (UITP). Paris, Brussels.

10 EPOMM (2013): European Platform for Mobility Management – Managing Mobility for a
11 Better Future. Project funded under the 7th framework programme of the European
12 Commission. URL: www.epomm.eu, accessed 15.7.2013.

13 Esri.com (2013): Albers Equal Area Conic. Web resource accessed 29.04.2013.

14 Essen, H. van, A. Schroten , M. Otten D. Sutter, C. Schreyer, R. Zandonella, M. Maibach, C.

15 Doll (2011): External Costs of Transport in Europe. Update Study for 2008. CE Delft,
16 Infras, Fraunhofer ISI commissioned by the International Union of Railways (UIC),
17 Paris. Delft, Zürich, Karlsruhe, September 2011. 1258

18 Eurostat (2013): Statistics on European Cities. Statistical office of the European Commission
19 (Eurostat), Statistics Explained. Web resource accessed 15.7.2013. URL:
20 http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Statistics_on_European
21 _cities

22 Ewing, R.H. (2008) 'Characteristics, causes, and effects of sprawl: A literature review', Urban
23 Ecology, pp. 519-535.

24 Farber, S. and Páez, A. (2011) 'Running to stay in place: the time-use implications of
25 automobile oriented land-use and travel', Journal of Transport Geography, 19(4), pp.
26 782-793.

27 Kahlmeier, S, N. Cavill, H. Dinsdale, H. Rutter, T. Götschi, C. Foster, P. Kelly, D. Clarke, P.

28 Oja, R. Fordham, D. Stone, F. Racioppi (2011): Health economic assessment tools
29 (HEAT) for walking and for cycling. Methodology and user guide. Economic
30 assessment of transport infrastructure and policies. World Health Organization. f

31 Kinnucan, H. W., Thompson, S. R. and Chang, H.-S. (eds), 1992. Commodity Advertising
32 and Promotion, Iowa State University Press, Ames, IA.

33 Lethco, T., A. Davis, S. Weber, and S. Sanagavarapu. A Street Management Framework for
34 Lower Manhattan in New York City. In Transportation Research Record: Journal of the
35 Transportation Research Board, No. -1, 2009, pp. 120–129.

19
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 Mejia-Dorantes, L., A. Paez, and J. M. Vassallo. Analysis of House Prices to Assess

2 Economic Impacts of New Public Transport Infrastructure. In Transportation Research
3 Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. -1, 2011, pp. 131–139.

4 Morency, C., Paez, A., Roorda, M.J., Mercado, R. G. and Farber, S. (2011) 'Distance
5 traveled in three Canadian cities: Spatial analysis from the perspective of vulnerable
6 population segments', Journal of Transport Geography, 19(1), pp. 39-50.

7 Páez, A., Mercado, R.G., Farber, S., Morency, C. and Roorda, M. (2010a) 'Relative
8 accessibility deprivation indicators for urban settings: Definitions and application to food
9 deserts in Montreal', Urban Studies, 47(7), pp. 1415.

10 Páez, A., Mercado, R.G., Farber, S., Morency, C. and Roorda, M. (2010b) 'Accessibility to
11 health care facilities in Montreal Island: an application of relative accessibility indicators
12 from the perspective of senior and non-senior residents', International Journal of Health
13 Geographics, 9(1), pp. 52.

14 Plasschaert, K., Van Acker, V., Witlox, F. (2013) The influence of neighborhood perception
15 and satisfaction on travel behavior. In WCTR 2013 Rio Proceedings:

16 Ramos, R. (2013): The Free Public Transport in France. Proceedings of the 13th World
17 Conference on Transport Research, Rio de Janeiro, 15.-18. July 2013. Paper no. 2212.

18 Shanghai Manual, 2010. A Guide for Sustainable Urban Development in the 21st Century.
19 Chapter 4 – Sustainable Urban Transport.

20 Thomas Klinger, Jeffrey R. Kenworthy, Martin Lanzendorf, Dimensions of urban mobility

21 cultures – a comparison of German cities (2013) Journal of Transport Geography,
22 Volume 31, July 2013, Pages 18-29, ISSN 0966-6923,

23 UITP (2012): Public Transport: the Smart Green Solution! Doubling Market Share Worldwide
24 by 2025. International Association for Public Transport (UITP), Brussels

25 URL:http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.3/index.cfm?TopicName=Albers%20Equal%20
26 Area%20Conic

27 USEmobility (2013): Why do travellers in Europe change transport mode? Facts and
28 implications for policy and providers. Summary document compiled by the EC-funded
29 research project USEmobility. Project co-ordiantion: Allianz pro Schiene e.V., Berlin

30 Van Acker, V., Van Wee, B., & Witlox, F. (2010). When transport geography meets social
31 psychology: Toward a conceptual model of travel behaviour. Transport reviews, 30(2),
32 219-240.

33 Vivier, J. and Pourbaix, J (2006): Mobility in Cities Database – better Mobility for People
34 Worldwide. Analyses and Recommendations. International Association of Public
35 Transport (UITP), Brussels

20
 Doll / Mejia-Dorantes / Freckmann / Shaykutdinov:
Success factors for Public Transport: the Role of Green Areas

1 Wallin, R. J. and Wright, P. H. (1974). Factors which influence modal choice. Traffic
2 Quarterly, (28), 271–289.

3 Zahabi, S. A. H., Miranda-Moreno, L. F., Patterson, Z., & Barla, P. 2013. Urban
4 Transportation Greenhouse Gas Emissions and its Link with Urban Form, Transit
5 Accessibility and Emerging Green Technologies: A Montreal case study. In
6 Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting (No. 13-1394).

21