Airport, airline and access mode choice in the San Francisco Bay area

In this article, we present an analysis of air travel choice behaviour in the San Francisco Bay area. The analysis extends existing work by considering the simultaneous choice by passengers of a departure airport, an airline, and an access mode. The analysis shows that several factors, most notably flight frequency and in-vehicle access time, have a significant overall impact on the attractiveness of an airport, airline and access mode combination, while factors such as fare and aircraft size have a significant effect only in some of the population subgroups. The analysis highlights the need to use separate models for resident and non-resident travellers, and to segment the population by journey purpose. The analysis also shows that important gains can be made through the inclusion of airport-inertia variables, and through using a nonlinear specification for the marginal returns of increases in flight frequency. In terms of model structure, the results suggest that the use of the different possible two-level nested logit models leads to modest, yet significant gains in model fit over the corresponding multinomial logit models, which already exhibit very high levels of prediction performance.