Abstract:
Urbanization in Bangkok Metropolitan Area has continued at a rapid pace for extended period, causing severe traffic congestion. Public transportation improvement is necessary to support the resulting travel demand. However, transit ridership forecasts have always been overestimated. The objective of this study is to forecast transit ridership using Direct Demand Model (DDD) which is based on characteristics of area around transit stations. Three types of factors, land use around the station, population around the station, and transportation characteristics, are independent variables in the model. Regression estimations show that station-specific factors that affect ridership include office space, retail space, road length, population, parking, number of bus routes, type of transit line, and type of station. The direct demand model is then used to estimate ridership, and the errors of estimation are found to be similar to those of the four-step model. The limitations of this study include the small number of stations that was used to estimate the model and the lack of variety in station types, which limits the prediction power of the model. Future research should address these issues by increasing the sample size of stations as well as the variety of station types, such as suburban stations.