TRAVEL MODE CHOICE BEHAVIOUR
STATUS:
ON GOING...
IN HO CHI MINH CITY
Pham Minh Tam, Vu Quynh Ai Nhu
Instructor: Rafael Martinez
TOPICS
INTRODUCTION
In terms of location, Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) is the centre of the Ho Chi Minh City Metropolitan Area and also the centre of Southeast Asia. HCMC is the gateway of many important transport modes for the country and the world by having an airport, railway, seaway, deep-water port, and a national and inter-regional road system. It has become the general and specialized centre of the Region in terms of commerce, services, education, high-tech healthcare, culture, entertainment, and sports (Ngô, 2021, p16).
According to statistics by the General Statistics Office of Vietnam statistics, HCMC's population was 9,227,598 million in 2020. However, at the time of the current census, the population has exceeded 10 million people (including those who have not registered). The current population of HCMC is equal to a megacity. However, the urbanization rate does not keep up with the natural population growth rate due to the number of immigrants flocking to the center in search of employment, education, and training opportunities. With such a great position, HCMC needs to take appropriate development steps. Nevertheless, the transport infrastructure system is not complete; traffic problems are barriers to the development of HCMC. Three wicked problems, also known as "tam tai": traffic jams, air pollution, and traffic accidents, are directly caused by the huge number of personal vehicles on the streets.
Private vehicles account for about 75% of vehicle use, while public transport accounts for a low rate of about 7% in HCMC. [...] The number of personal vehicles in circulation tends to increase. In 2020, HCMC had 8.94 million personal vehicles (motorcycles account for 90.8%); from 2010 to the present, more than four million vehicles have been added. That means we have 1000 new cars and motorcycles registered per day. [...]The development of public passenger transport is the most feasible and accessible solution to solve the “tam tai.” It has been proven effective in many cities worldwide, such as Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, and Curitiba. In 2020, the government set a target that the share of Public Transport must account for 35% - 45% in big cities (GIZ, 2021). However, in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, this figure is only 9% - 10%, and in other cities, it is less than 5%. (GIZ, 2021). HCMC has published Decision No. 3998/QD-UBND, "On approval of the Project to enhance public passenger transport combined with control of the use of personal motor vehicles in traffic in Ho Chi Minh City." Currently, buses are the primary means of public transport. According to the HCMC Department of Transport, 127 bus routes are operating in the area (including inter-provincial routes and bus routes serving city sightseeing tours). In the past two years, public transport has not improved or even worsened due to the impact of the COVID19 epidemic, the attraction of private vehicles, and the incomplete metro line. In our opinion, it is necessary to seriously study the movement behaviour of people (including indigenous people and immigrants) to design appropriate policies and innovations to attract road users to use this means of transport—public convenience.
Main findings
a. Factors affecting the behaviour of choosing means of transportation.
In the question "Why do people use private means more than public means?", we put forward many hypotheses about the answer. Currently, urban design and planning are human-centred; people are affected and negatively affect things, patterns, and infrastructure in the city. Therefore, we choose the perspective from the travel mode choice behaviour (TMCB) to find the answer to the above question.Travel mode choices vary with personal characteristics, household characteristics, journey purpose, and attitude/value clusters (Stephen, 2011). To create a system of structures affecting fair trade, we used the Travel mode choice cycle (Figure 1) - a diagram created from a combination of many social - psychological attitude theories applied in travel behaviour.
Figure 1: Travel mode choice cycle. (Vos, Patrick and Tommy, 2021)
In addition, the results from the study on Satisfaction levels when using the bus, evaluations of public Figure 1: Travel mode choice cycle. (Vos, Patrick and Tommy, 2021)transport and intention to use public transport in HCMC support the hypotheses in the Diagram of constructs affecting Travel mode choice behavior (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Diagram of constructs affecting Travel mode choice behaviour.
Travel mode choice is directly affected by intention and indirectly by satisfaction level. HCMC bus users mostly feel satisfied with the extremely reasonable cost of paying for the fare. Externalities such as traffic accidents, bad weather, and an increase in gasoline prices make people afraid to use private vehicles and positively affect the choice of public transport. However, in addition to the factors that positively affect the intention to use public transport as above, there are countless reasons for people to use private vehicles instead of using public transport:
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Social - economic characteristics (motorcycle ownership, migrant status, marital status, income): according to a survey in HCMC, nearly 90% of people who already own personal vehicles do not want to switch to using buses (Pham, 2014); the majority of people who come to work, students in the city are migrants, and they tend to use personal vehicles to find accommodation and explore the city easily; married people tend to use their car to be more proactive in their time and convenient in transporting their children; High income is a good shape for a person to own their vehicle and maintain it, those with the low income they have no conditions they will choose to take public transport.
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Journey characteristics: travel distance, total travel time, and total travel cost are essential factors for a person to decide what they choose. People will choose public transport such as train or bus at long distances to move. However, with the characteristics of migrants from the Southeast and Southwest provinces need to use personal means for work convenience, so private transport is still the top priority; At short distances (under 500m, from 500m to 1000m), active modes will be preferred, but up to 79% of people still use motorbikes for short distances (Nguyen et al., 2019). Regarding time, buses in HCMC cannot compete because the total travel time by bus will equal the sum of travel time, waiting time, transit time, and delay ability compared to the total time when travelling the same distance as private vehicles, including travel time, parking time, and walking time. Regarding the cost of travelling by motorbike and bus, taking the bus is somewhat more economical, but because of the trade-off of convenience, people are willing to pay more.
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Intended use bus and metro: The effects of increasing usage probability are in descending order: familiarity with the bus, usefulness of the bus, environmental awareness, bus quality, and travel distance. Factors that reduce bus usage gradually decrease from the attractiveness of private transport, community influence, income, and age (Pham, 2014). Intention to use the metro is influenced by four factors, ranked in order from strongest to weakest, which are Perceiving the usefulness of the metro, Receiving environmental awareness, subjective norms, and attractiveness of industrial development. Demographic factors do not influence the decision to use (Dang, 2012).
In summary, because the competitiveness of public transport (primarily buses) is not equal to that of private vehicles, we can see motorbike is the transport mode of priority for HCMC inhabitants. The evidence for the low competitiveness of public transport is shown in the service and quality of products from buses provided by the government and some private and cooperative organizations. People do not want to use the bus because of the lack of familiarity with public transport. We think the lack of specific instructions, schedule information, or familiarity with private vehicles causes the above problems. In addition, many ridership is unsatisfied with service quality because they have difficulty accessing information such as wait time, seat availability, routes, and timetable. Many passengers are not satisfied with the attitude of staff and drivers; bad quality of buses, shelters, and stations; most of all, they feel unsafe when on the bus and at bus stops due to easy pickpocketing and harassment.
Table 1: Summary of factors that negatively affect the choice of public transport in HCMC.
Our view is to let public transport be used equitably and as expected so that it will solve urgent traffic problems in HCMC. We need to improve the competitiveness of public transport and make it more accessible and accessible to all. Therefore, in the next section, we propose a smart bus shelter model to solve the problem of providing easily accessible information to passengers and making waiting stations safer.
b. Smart bus shelter model, a way to disseminate information on public transport.
Modern solution
quality of life of residentsnatural environmentsustainable development of city infrastructure
Intelligence shelter
The shelter also uses technologies of advanced glass processing. It has a ceramic print on glass and a glass pane with an electronic display
In cooperation with Tartu City Government and Mobi Lab, stickers with QR codes and Near-field communication (NFC) were placed at bus stops in Tartu. By scanning the QR code or touching the NFC sticker, information regarding the arrival of busses at that specific stop will quickly be displayed on the user's smartphone. The information in the application is displayed in real-time and the mobile application works in the same way as the real-time information display found at the bus stop.
Table 2: Evaluated case studies
