when travelling over four zones ($5.80). In the Perth metropolitan
area, only the Mandurah line extends over
five zones. After closely
examining the travel patterns of respondents who travelled by
trains over four zones, we identified that 24% of them chose
stations, mostly Murdoch station on the Mandurah line, even
though they came from a location near other train lines.
Interestingly, about 82% of these travelled by bus feeder services
to the train station, which is a good example of commuter/work-
based transit service.
Fig. 4a also shows that the predicted probability of respondents
choosing a station that is the nearest station to their origin is over
80% if travel distance from an origin to the chosen station is less
than 800 m. However, when they have to travel over 10 km from an
origin to the chosen station, the estimated probability of choosing
the nearest station is still over 80% only for respondents travelling
over
five zones. For respondents travelling over less than
five
zones, the estimated probability dropped sharply, especially for
respondents who travelled on trains within one zone, the
estimated probability decreased to 39%. The station, which belongs
to the travelling-over-five-zone category, is Warnbro: a captive
station. While stations belonging to the travelling-within-one-
zone category are non-captive stations. Lack of competition with
surrounding stations has led to a bigger catchment area for
Warnbro station, leaving the train users with less travel options.
This demonstrates a certain level of transport disadvantage for the
train users.
The resulting sensitivity plot (Fig. 4b) for non-captive stations
calculated based on the model in Table 8 indicates the same trends
shown in Fig. 4. However, the probability of choosing the nearest
stations for non-captive stations decreased more quickly than the
captive station model. Generally speaking, for the same travel
distance, the more zones the commuters travel, the higher
probability to choose the nearest stations. A very interesting thing