Transportation Mode Choice Model for Palestinian Universities Students: A Case Study on An-Najah New Campus

The aim of this research is to develop a transportation mode choice model to predict the utility function for transportation modes used in Palestinian universities, considering the New Campus of An–Najah National University, which is the largest university in Palestine, for this study case. Analyses were conducted for the current situation of mode choice concerning main used transportations modes. The developed model covers the main three modes of transportation, the first mode is “Private car”, which includes the personal car, carpool and share a ride users, the second mode is “Shared taxi” as it is the most used mode among all other modes of transportation, and the third mode is “Bus”, which is fairly used, and it is important for future policy considerations, in order to encourage its use to assist in solving the mounting traffic problems. A survey of primary information on mode choice was conducted, through questionnaires, distributed on a sample of university students. The results indicated that the developed model exhibits a good fit, as the adjusted goodness-of-fit measure statistics rho-squares ( ) for the model is 0.504. The variables that mostly affected the mode choice are gender, car ownership, per capita family income, shared taxi travel cost, and bus travel time. As expected, those who own private cars prefer going to the university by their cars more than using public transportation modes. The results also show that the use of the private cars increases with the increase of the monthly family income divided by the family size (i.e., with the per capita income). Moreover, as bus travel time and shared taxi travel cost increase; the use of the related utilities decrease, and that females choose buses and shared taxis more than males. Also, students prefer to choose private cars over buses and shared taxis as they believe the private cars are safer and more comfortable. Future studies could be done by developing a mode choice model for employees, and for students traveling from university back to home, and use such studies findings for wider policy level actions, and to further development of the transportation planning processes in the Palestinian universities. Referring to the research results, many transportation alternative solutions could be done to encourage using public transportation; bus lanes or BRT (bus rapid transit) systems could be used to decrease travel time for bus.