Modal Split of Work Trips Undertaken by Public Servants in Minna, Niger State, Nigeria

Modal Split of Work Trips Undertaken by Public Servants in Minna, Niger State, Nigeria

Chapter One

Content Summary

Objectives

The objectives of this research are

To appraise the modal split of work trips in the study
To develop models for the trips’
To proffer solutions to the problems of work trips mode accessibility in the study

CHAPTER TWO

LITERATURE REVIEW

Mode Choice

The choice of transport mode is probably one of the most important classic models in transport planning. This is because of the key role played by public transport sector in policy making. Public transport modes make use of road space more efficiently in Nigeria than private transport. Also they have more social benefits like if more people begin to use public transport, there will be less congestion on the roads and the accidents rate will be less. Again in public transport, one can travel with low cost. In addition, the fuel is used more efficiently. Main characteristics of public transport are that they will have some particular schedules, frequency e.t.c. On the other hand, private transport is highly flexible. It provides a more comfortable and convenient means of travel. It has better accessibility also. The issue of mode choice, therefore, is probably the single most important element in transport planning and policy making. It affects the general efficiency with which one can travel in urban areas. It is important then to develop and use models which are sensitive to those travel attributes that influence individual choices of mode. Travel arises because someone has to move from one place to another for one reason or the other. Therefore for each trip there must be the origin and destination. In the process of achieving origin and destination, sometimes people only use one vehicle (unimodal). This is usually used as personal vehicles. But there are also many people that use more than one mode (multimodal) to travel by using the public transport system. The travellers that use several modes usually need longer journey time and more cost, so many people switch to personal vehicles. Travellers can be classified into two groups: choice riders and captive riders. Choice riders have two travel modes to select: public transport or private transport (car or motorcycle) whereas captive riders have only one travel mode option to select i.e. public transport.

Factors Influencing the Choice of Mode

The factors may be listed under three groups

Characteristics of the trip makers: The following features are found to be important

Car availability and /or ownership
Possession of a driving license
Household structures (young couple, couples with children, retired people etc)
Income
Decision made elsewhere, for example the need to use a car at work, take children to schooletc
Residential density
Characteristics of the journey: Mode choice is strongly influencedby
The trip purpose: for example, the journey to work is normally easier to undertake by public transport than other journey because of its regularity and the adjustment possible in the long run.
Time of the day when journey isundertaken
Late trips are more difficult to accommodate by public transport.
Characteristics of the transport facility: There are two types of factors. One is quantitative and the other is qualitative.

Quantitative factors are

Relative travel time: in – vehicle, waiting and walking times by eachmode
Relative monetary cost (fares, fuel and direct costs)
Availability and cost of parking Qualitative factors which are a bit difficult to measure are

Comfort and convenience
Reliability and regularity
Protection,

Factors Affecting Mode Choice Decision

Very little work has been done on the demand for passenger travel in developing countries. But understanding and predicting urban travel demand is crucial to transport planning and design of urban areas, especially in the rapidly growing developing countries. Mode choice is perhaps the most policy -oriented element in the whole process of analyzing and forecasting demand for urban travel. In particular, the analysis of workers choice of modes is intended to provide information about the effects of various policies , like fare structures, taxes on petrol, adding buses, planning routes, improving roads, etc. The information can be used along with other information in deciding which policies are to be implemented and which are likely to be more effective. More recently, mode choice models incorporating parking spaces are being estimated in developed countries. The effects of incentives designed to promote ride-sharing (car -pooling and van -pooling) on work trips to reduce congestion and pollution are estimated using data on workers commuting behaviour [(Feeney, 1989); Willson and Shoup (1990); Hwang and Giuliano (1990); Stevens (1990)].

Thobani (1984) studies in the city of Karachi is the most well known. He estimated a probabilistic joint mode choice and auto ownership model. He estimate demand elasticity for time (access and in – vehicle) and travel costs. The author applied the nested logit maximum likelihood technique to a sample of 400 travellers in the city of Karachi. The study revealed that the decision to own a car is made simultaneously with the decision about which mode to take to work. The results of the study suggested that Heads of household have greater utility from the use of the car.

Car travel time is less onerous than bus travel time.
Suburban dwellers have lower values for time than urban dwellers (supporting train’s results).
The elasticity with respect to out-of-vehicle time is highand
Cross elasticity between bus and minibus, which are close substitutes, are

CHAPTER THREE

METHODOLOGY

Survey Design

A carefully designed questionnaire was administered to acquire inputs to the discrete choice model that was developed in this work. The multinomial logit model was used to calculate the probability of occurrence of each particular mode of travel. A procedure which some authors (Kish, 1965) refer to as “experts choice “was used. This is a purposive or judgment sampling method used to pick typical or representative samples. In the case of this survey, workers who had an insight of their co-workers were chosen in each of the ministries. These are people who could easily separate their co-workers into different income groups.

Questionnaires were administered to these selected workers who now distribute them proportionately to the respondents (civil servants). Burgers (1982), Hughes and Preski (1997) refers to these selected individuals as “key informants”.

Derivation of Multinomial Logit Model

Commencing from the model with only two alternatives. Suppose, the consumer will make his choice based on the utility maximization rule (Ben-Akiva and Lerman, 1985). According to this rule, the consumer i chooses the alternatives, which maximizes his utility U_i . The two alternatives j and k creates the choice set C with C = { j ,k }. The probability that consumer i chooses alternatives j is

CHAPTER FOUR

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

Sample Size and Response Rates

A total of 2,000 questionnaires were administered for the field work, out of which 1,467 were returned and used for the analysis. This gives a response rate of 73.4%.

Table 4.1 – 4.7 illustrates the descriptive frequency distribution of respondent by Age, Position in household, Income level, and Mode of travel, Travel time, Car ownership and Sex respectively.

CHAPTER FIVE

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Conclusion

In conclusion, as expected civil service in Minna is dominated by male workers and taxi appears to be the dominant mode of transport in Minna with 25.4% of workers depending on it. Respondents who earn

□45,000- 60,000 and those who earn above □61,000 never indicated walk as means of transport to work. Bus, taxi and car passenger are the frequent modes of transport use by workers of all income levels.

Recommendations

This work focused on work trips which constitutes 80% of trips making in an urban area. However, for completeness, further studies in the following areas should be done.

Recreational trips e.g.

Journey to mosque
Church
Shopping and
Tourist etc

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