Estimation Of Inter-city Travel Demand For Public Road Transport From Owerri To Some Selected Cities In Nigeria

ABSTRACT 

This study calibrates an intercity travel demand model which uses the principal structural variables that have been identified in the literature. It uses a robust econometric method which has been little applied in the sphere of land transport in Nigeria. This research develops an urban public travel demand model for 19 directional O-D city-pair network originating from Owerri Urban. Using revealed preference data from the period of 2014 to 2016 which was filtered into 207 observations operated by the 16 transport companies in Owerri, Imo State. The analysis modelled the pattern of correlations among service variables which are fares, journey time, distance, frequency by a log-linear model using OLS and Logit estimation. The estimates yield better demand elasticities than those of direct linear models. Other findings include that; overall fares elasticities are low, so that increases in fare will almost always lead to increases in revenue thus decreasing in the number of passengers. The result of the analysis agrees with the accepted ‘standard’ public transport fares elasticity value of -0.3. Demand elasticities with respect to Frequency are positive and with respect to Fares are negative. All estimated frequency coefficients indicate that potential travelers prefer routes with high frequency. The coefficients of journey time indicate that travelers prefer routes with shorter journey time. Whereas no specific time trends for frequency and fare effects are found, no structural changes related to other variables exist. There are significant differences between the factors associated with short-distance and the factors associated with long-distance urban travel behavior. This study provides a framework for the urban transport companies to estimate demand specifically on various routes operated and position their services by designing the service positioning matrix to ensure business sustainability.