Factors Influencing Journey-to-Work by Public Transit in Mega Canadian Cities

In this chapter, a modeling exercise is carried out to analyze the factors influencing the journey-to-work by public transit in the largest two Canadian urban centers: Toronto, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec. Transit trip generation at the census tract level for the year 2011 is regressed against urban form and network design variables after controlling for several socio-economic and demographic variables. The simultaneous auto-regressive (SAR) modeling approach is employed to account for the presence of spatial dependencies in the modeled data. These spatial effects are usually neglected in travel demand models, leading to bias in the estimates obtained. While the estimated socio-economic and demographic parameters reinforce previous findings from the literature, the inclusion of urban form and network design variables offers new insights regarding the role that urban planning can have on transit trip generation. The results reported in this chapter can, thus, help promote sustainable urban planning policies.