Urban Public Transport Choice Behavior Analysis and Service Improvement Policy-making: A Case Study from the Metropolitan City, Chengdu, China

1 As the metropolitan city in Western China, Chengdu has been suffered from serious 2 traffic congestion. The strategy of urban public transport priority was put into agenda to 3 relieve traffic congestion. But the public transport sharing rate is only 27% in Chengdu 4 which is much lower than the developed country. Consequently, it is of great importance 5 to study the measures to improve the service, and provide technical support to the 6 policy-makers. This paper selected the traffic corridor between Southwest Jiaotong 7 University district and downtown as the experiment subject. The orthogonal design 8 method was used to generate stated preference questionnaires. Some variables were used 9 to define the utility of the three alternatives and construct the Logit model. Then, the 10 relationships between the cost, time variable and the choice probability of the public 11 transport were analyzed. According to the results, we found that the workability of 12 Multinomial Logit (MNL) Model was better than Nest Logit (NL) model. The low bus 13 ticket price cannot achieve good result except for increasing the stress of the government 14 finance. We also put forward some effective measures to improve the level of service, 15 including built Bus Rapid Transit systems, reducing the access time to Metro and bus stop, 16 limiting parking supply to control the car use. 17