Growth in urban populations, and the associated demand for access to goods, amenities and employment, is placing increasing pressure on urban transportation networks. This has reinvigorated interest in urban public transport networks, which can provide efficient mobility to meet these growing demands. The role of the built environment in shaping travel demand is recognised, however research is unclear on how it impacts transit ridership specifically. Little attention has been given to the built environment factors associated with demand for specific modes operating in multimodal networks. As such, it is not known if mode is an important factor to consider when predicting demand for transit in an urban setting. Furthermore, many barriers exist to knowledge development in the field, including variability between studies, a lack of extensibility of data and research design, and the context sensitivity of transport systems and travel behaviour. To address this gap, this research project aims to explore the built environment predictors of transit ridership for different modes.
This project is part of the Sustainable and Effective Public Transport – Graduate Research Industry Partnership (SEPT-GRIP) and was supervised by Professor Graham Currie and Dr Alexa Delbosc. The project was undertaken by Laura Aston and sponsored by Transport for Victoria and Monash University.
The thesis is now available online here