Does crowding affect the path choice of metro passengers?

•Metro passengers reroute to avoid crowding itself as well as the delay from crowding.•The model with additional variables for transit delay and passenger load is proposed.•An intensive amount of real path choices set was tested.•We demonstrate that crowding decreases the overall welfare of metro passengers.

This paper investigates crowding effect on the path choice of metro passengers. We show people reroute not only to avoid the delay from crowding but also to evade crowding itself. More specifically, a logit model fits best when it uses the transit delay from crowding as well as the passenger load of a connection in addition to the conventional explanatory variables. Also, we demonstrate that crowding decreases the overall welfare of metro passengers. The model is tested on the real path choice data acquired by the recent algorithm by Hong et al. (2015) known to detect the real path choice from Smart Card data in more than 90% of the cases.