Nonlinear Influence of Commute Time Tolerance Threshold on Commute Mode Choice Based on the Semicompensatory Model

Abstract

The tolerance threshold of commute time (TTCT) reflects the longest commute time that commuters can tolerate from home to the workplace. When the commute time exceeds the TTCT, the commuting utility significantly reduces, which has a nonlinear influence on commuting mode choice. To reveal the nonlinear relationship between the commuting utility and commute time, the TTCT is introduced to constrained multinomial logit (CMNL) model based on the semicompensatory decision-making mechanism. In addition, an empirical study is carried out on 405 commuters in Kunming, China. The results show that the CMNL model has a higher fitting accuracy than the MNL model, which indicates that the TTCT is a significant explanatory variable for the commuting mode choice. Moreover, the commuting utility does not decrease linearly with the commute time. An appropriate commute time range (about 5–25 min) could bring positive commute utility to the commuters, but the commute utility is negatively impacted when the commute time is larger than the TTCT. Therefore, it is necessary importing the TTCT in the utility function to improve the predictive power of the commuting mode choice model.