Modeling Mode Choice of Air Passengers’ Ground Access to Brisbane Airport

Like other developed countries, Australia is experiencing considerable growth in air travel demand. This growth is putting tremendous pressure on airports to improve the capacity and level of service of access and egress modes. The main goal of this study was to develop a robust mode choice model for passengers’ access to airports, in the context of Brisbane, Australia. The novelty of this study includes (1) the use of recent techniques to combine passengers’ revealed and stated preferences for mode of access to airports and (2) the development of both traditional multinomial logit (MNL) as well as mixed logit (MXL) models using these data. The data were collected from 1,435 passengers through an online survey of both revealed and stated preferences, with the stated preferences pivoting on their most recent trip to Brisbane Airport. With these data, access mode choice models were estimated. MNL and MXL models were estimated that directly considered the effects of passenger mode choice inertia as well as novel passenger-specific characteristics. These factors had a large, statistically significant effect on the estimated models. The benefit of the MXL model was shown in the results, as the passengers’ value of time from the MXL model was A$105.15/h, which was strikingly lower than the MNL-estimated value of time. In addition, there were notably high direct elasticities for bus and shuttle with respect to travel time, and for car and taxi with respect to travel cost.