A model to assess public transport demand stability

Transport authorities, especially those in developing countries where rising income stimulate increased car ownership rates, are often concerned with maintaining or increasing levels of public transport use. Therefore, the ability to identify clients at risk of abandoning the system can be valuable for remedial measures, allowing for more focused quality improvements. We present and apply a model that determines the probability of migrating from public to private transport at both aggregated and disaggregated levels. In application, the model predicted migration with 60% accuracy in the first preference recovery measure. The proposed model can improve the understanding of the behavior of public transport users, the analysis of demand stability and the factors influencing migration. This, in turn, can help to focus policy and management measures and increase the efficiency of public investment.