Study of Travel Mode Transfer, First-Mile Trip and Last-Mile Trip for Public Transportation Services in Bangkok

Several
countries have continuous goals to reduce the usage of private cars and promote
the sustainable and environmentally friendly travel choices.  The solutions to achieve such goals transportation
agencies are to give importance to initiatives that can make public
transportation services as attractive choices to private car users such as the
improvements of service frequency, the integration of travel fares, the
reduction of waiting times and the addition of facilities in public
transportation system.  In addition to
the direct services, the more important services are the connections between
trip origins, trip destinations and public transportation stations.  These are called the first and last mile
travels.  The FLM problem is resulted
from the connectivity between stations, origins and destinations such as long FLM
distance that impedes active transport modes (i.e., walking and bicycling) for
the access to and egress from public transportation stations.   Over
the past five years, the extensive expansion of sky trains and subway trains in
the Bangkok metropolitan area causes the expansion of the city. The current bus
routes have many disadvantages such as higher travel time.  The connectivity between travel modes
including bus, rail and boat has not been improved to an acceptable service quality
for public transportation users. The energy consumption in the road transportation
sector in Bangkok has been and will continue to be high. With such high traffic
congestion and the connectivity problem in public transportation modes, the
high energy consumption causes air pollutants such as PM2.5 that directly affects
the health of people. This research proposal has four objectives. The first
objective is to study the factors influencing the mode choice for first and
last mile travel for public transportation systems in Bangkok. The second is to
study the energy consumption and air pollutant emission in
land transportation and water transportation as well as associated first and
last mile travels in Bangkok. The third is to create the geo database and
geographic information system for facilities in public transportation systems
in Bangkok in order to identify the potential transfer hubs. The last objective
is to study the connectivity between stations in bus, rail and boat transit
systems via mobility as a service and the management of local community
co-sharing.  The analysis results will
allow the development of the policy-based recommendations and the guidelines to
promote the Carbon neutral society within 2065 to 2070 according to the goal of
Thai government.