Modeling the mobility choices of older people in a transit-oriented city: Policy insights

Hong Kong is a transit-oriented city with an extremely high public transportation share (approximately 90%). Additionally, in this city, the percentage of older people aged 60 or above is predicted to reach 38.0% in 2064. Thus, the provision of age-friendly public transportation is timely and enormously significant. Only with a better understanding of mobility behaviors of older people, it is possible to tailor transportation systems and optimize market strategies to cater to their actual needs and preferences. Based on the 2011 Travel Characteristic Survey data, this paper calibrates a mixed binary logit model and a conditional logit model to uncover older people's travel propensity, as well as destination and departure time choices. The findings include: (1) a host of socio-demographic variables and land-use attributes affect travel propensity; (2) owning an automobile and driving license are too weak to exert significant influence on travel propensity. This finding is in contrast with the conventional wisdom in car-dominant cities where car ownership and license-holding status are significant predictors of mobility; (3) there are random taste variations among respondents regarding travel propensity; and (4) time-constant destination and time-variant origin-destination pair characteristics influence older people's destination and departure time decisions. Based on the results, a few policy suggestions (e.g., reducing the actual and perceived costs associated with interchanges, time-varying public transport service) are discussed. We believe that these policy sights can act as a valuable reference to transportation planning which addresses the mobility of older people, especially in the metropolitan cities which provide similar public transport services.