Travel Demand and the Evaluation of Transportation System Change: A Reconsideration of the Random Utility Approach

Abstract

Williams formulated a consistent analytic representation of the trip decision process and developed compatible measures of user benefit arising from the transportation system change within the framework of random utility theory. Here, the random utility approach is reconsidered and reformulated with the aim of describing individual behavior more precisely and more realistically. The model introduces explicitly the income-time constraint imposed on an individual and permits an individual to choose multiple destinations and determine the number of trips freely. Special attention is also paid to the form of utility function which allows the consumer's surplus to be rigorously defined and to be exactly measured by the area under the demand curve.