Panel approach

There is ample consensus that psycho-attitudinal factors play a key role in influencing people’s mode choice. Hybrid choice models use these theoretical frameworks so as to include latent constructs for capturing the impact of subjective factors on mode choice. Recent work in transportation research raised the question about the ability of these models to derive policy implications that aim to change travel behavior, given the focus on cross-sectional data. Therefore we designed a survey for collecting longitudinal data so as to evaluate (i) the long term effects on travel mode choice of the implementation of a new light rail line, (ii) to detect any changes in the psycho-attitudinal factors and/or in socio-economic characteristics after implementation of those measures. Our results show that latent variables were not significantly different over waves, showing that the impact of the psychological construct remained stable over time, even after the implementation of a hard measure.