Transpn. Ru.-A Vol. 21A. No. 6. pp. 439-449. Printed in Great Britain.

1987

0191~26U711987 $3.00+ .OO 0 1987 Pergamon Journals Ltd.

AIRPORT CHOICE IN A MULTIPLE AIRPORT REGION

GREIG HARVEY

Department

of Civil Engineering,

Standford University, Stanford, CA 94305, U.S.A.

(Received 20 May 1986; in revised form 9 March 1987)

Abstrart--This paper reports on an investigation of air traveler behavior in choosing among departure airports in a multiple airport region. Data from a 1980 survey of air passengers in the San Francisco Bay Area were used to study the characteristics of airport choice for local residents. Multinomial logit models were developed for business and nonbusiness travelers. The analysis demonstrates that ground access time and the frequency of direct air service to the chosen destination can account for a large portion of the variation in airport usage patterns, but that both access time and frequency have nonlinear effects on airport utility. It also suggests that even multi-stop direct service is strongly preferred to connecting flights. The results highlight the importance of attention to ground access in planning for multiple airport systems, and the difficulty of predicting airport use without information about marketspecific airline schedules.

INTRODUCIION

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

A number of metropolitan regions have more than one commercial airport. Where multiple airports exist or are contemplated, it is important to understand how airlines and air travelers make use of a regional airport system. Airport utilization results from the interaction of choices made by airlines (as businesses) and air travelers (as consumers), subject to technological and institutional constraints. Airline scheduling in a multiple airport region reflects decisions based on anticipated operational efficiencies (such as terminal consolidation and higher load factors) and on improved network connectivity, in light of consumer preferences. But why do consumers favor one airport over another? What are the characteristics of airport location and airline operations that affect travelers airport choices? It has been understood for some time that access characteristics, flight frequency, and service differentiation (e.g. pricing) all have an effect on passenger distribution among available airports, and numerous aggregate studies of airport use can be found in the literature. This paper presents the initial results of an analysis of airport choice within a formal individual choice framework. Data from the San Francisco Bay Area were used to estimate multinomial logit models of airport choice as a function of access time and flight frequency. Particular attention was paid to nonlinear effects in the utility equations. The primary goal of the work was to explore simple hypotheses about time and frequency in order to build a foundation for later, more detailed and comprehensive studies of air traveler behavior. A secondary goal was to produce information and models that could be of use in airport system planning.

An airline trip is considered to result from a set of choices made by a party of air travelers, where a party is defined as one or more individuals who jointly plan and execute an air journey. The choices include: whether or not to make an air trip; the destination of the air trip; time of day to travel; airline; airport; location of departure for airport; fare category; mode of access; and parking option (for auto access modes). Figure 1 illustrates one possible hierarchy of these choices, in which the decisions whether, on what days, and where to make a trip are higher level choices (in comparison with choice of departure airport), and the decisions about airline, exact departure time, and access mode are lower level choices. The choice of departure airport is treated here as a simple process conditioned on the decision to make a trip to a specific destination on a specific date. Airport choice is assumed to depend on personal and airport attributes, including the general characteristics of access to each airport. This implies that higher-level choices have already been determined by each traveling party, and that lower-level choices affect airport choice in general ways only. As Fig. 1 suggests, these structural simplifications gloss over a number of linkages that may prove important in later research. For example, some travelers will have strong preferences for departure times, perhaps reflecting desired arrival times at their destinations. Airport characteristics during the preferred time intervals will be important to this group, while average daily characteristics may determine the behavior of others. Along similar lines, the quality of nonauto access will affect the attractiveness of an airport for some travelers, making
439

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Fig. 1. A possible decision hierarchy for air travel. Note: Choice of fare category has been omitted due to probable interactions at multiple levels of the hierarchy.

detailed access characteristics important. In addition, some travelers will develop strong airline preferences, which will tend to bias them toward airports that are best served by a given airline. Finally, there will be cases in which travelers choose origin and destination airports jointly, or perhaps even choose the destination airport after selecting the origin airport (i.e. when the destination region has multiple airports as well.) Exploration of linkages in the choice hierarchy will be carried out in later stages of the work. The purpose here is to see whether the simplest possible structural assumption can yield a plausible and accurate model of airport choice, and to determine how the key variables influence airport choice within the framework imposed by that assumption. Significant differences in airport choice behavior arise along at least two dimensions: (1) Residents vs. nonresidents. Residents of a region have access to more complete information than nonresidents about the available airport options. This information differential may mean that certain

characteristics of airports, such as temporal patterns of access congestion, simply do not influence the decisions of nonresidents to the same degree as residents. (2) Business vs. nonbusiness travelers. Business travelers may be relatively insensitive to cost because they often do not pay their own travel expenses. Also, businessmen often function under tight time constraints, making them relatively more sensitive to travel time and to flight frequency. This necessitates the development of separate models for resident business travelers, resident nonbusiness travelers, nonresident nonbusiness travelers, and nonresident business travelers. The two resident categories are analyzed in this paper, while the nonresident categories are left for future work.
RELATION TO PREVIOUS WORK

De Neufville has outlined a conceptual model of the regional airport system that emphasizes the joint role of air travelers and airlines in determining pat-

Airport choice in a multiple airport region Invoking data from previous studies, he argued that an airports share of passengers in an air travel market has a nonlinear relation with the airports share of flights in the market (1976, pages 69-70); that access distance to an airport affects both airport attractiveness and the demand for air travel in short-haul markets (1976, pages 63-65); and that high flight concentrations at an airport are attractive enough to outweigh a substantial access disadvantage (1976, pages 67-73). While providing a useful overview of factors in airport competition, deNeufvilles discussion also highlights two important data problems: most information about airport competition is highly context-specific and thus difficult to generalize; and little evidence is available about the joint effects of flight frequency and access time on the behavior of air travelers. A number of studies have employed survey data and aggregate modeling approaches to investigate the relationships among frequency, access, and airport market share. In general, however, sample sizes have been insufficient to support simultaneous disaggregation by air travel market and local origin zone. One of the few detailed aggregate analyses of a particular air market was reported by Kanafani, ef al. (1975), who studied competition among airports in the heavily traveled San Francisco-Los Angeles corridor. Frequencies and average prices were obtained for each of the fifteen routes between the two regions (using three Bay Area and five Los Angeles airports). Each region was divided into a small number of zones representing ground access origins and destinations. The distribution of trips over available routes for a given origin-destination pair was assumed to result from a logit-type allocation process, with a linear utility that included access time (min), frequency (flights per week), and price (dollars). Separate coefficients were estimated for business and nonbusiness travelers: Coefficients of frequency .003 .002
terns of airport use (1976,1984).

441

city pairs, in which the routing alternatives consisted of nonstop service, direct connection through Atlanta, and indirect connection through Atlanta. The utility equation included air travel time (min), frequency (flights per day), fare (dollars), a dummy for aircraft size (0 for ~30 seats, 1 for ~50 seats, and 5 otherwise), and a dummy for quality of connection (1 if there is a change of plane, .5 if not). The estimated coefficients were: Variable Travel time (min)
Flight frequency (daily) Fare (dollars) Aircraft type Connection Quality These values indicate

Coefficient
- ,015 ,239 - ,028 1.461 - 1.557

Traveler Type Business Nonbusiness

time -.l -.l

fare -.04 -.08.

a number of differences from the earlier study. The travel time coefficients suggest that airport access time may be considerably more onerous than air time (which includes both in-flight time and ground time at intermediate points). The frequency coefficients show an order of magnitudegreater sensitivity (after the earlier coefficients are multiplied by seven to reflect daily rather than weekly frequencies). One possible explanation is the difference in markets treated by the two studies: the Atlanta case offered a wide range of frequencies, while routes in the San Francisco-Los Angeles corridor were densely served. In other words, the difference could be explained by nonlinearities in the frequency contribution to utility. These aggregate studies provide useful information about the correlation of flight frequency with air traveler behavior and about the importance of access time in a specific range of market conditions. The purpose of this paper is to amplify and extend the insights of earlier work by applying discrete choice analysis to the airport choice behavior of a sample of individual air travelers. This has the advantage of allowing both markets and access origins to be represented in detail with a relatively small data set. By including a wide range of conditions, it also facilitates the exploration of nonlinearities in the utility function for airport choice.
THE BAY AREA

While the fare variable yielded correct signs and the expected difference between business and nonbusiness travelers, its contribution to the explanatory power of the model was small, likely due to the lack of variation in fares among available routes. Conversely, access travel time showed strong explanatory power. Indeed, the magnitude of the travel time coefficient suggests that access time is the dominant factor in route choice. By ignoring ground access, it is possible to derive useful insights about frequency from aggregate data based on a much wider range of market conditions. For example, in the context of a study on hubbing at Atlanta, Kanafani and Ghobrial(1985) developed a logit model of air passenger route share between P!?(A) 21:6-E

AIRPORT CHOICE SAMPLE

An estimation sample was extracted from air passenger survey data collected by the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission in August 1980 (MTC, 1981). The survey was administered to outbound passengers in the departure lounges of all three major Bay Area airports-San Francisco International (SFO), Oakland International (OAK), and San Jose Municipal (SJC). Higher sampling rates were used at SJC and OAK than at SFO. The resulting choice-based sample required that certain adjustments be made in order to produce unbiased model coefficients, as will be discussed below. The raw survey file from MTC yielded about 2,800 observations for residents of the nine-county Bay

442

G. were coded

HARVEY

missing critical items (e.g. origin addresses) were removed from the estimation file and those remaining were checked for inconsistencies. About 1,860 observations survived this culling. A cross-tabulation of the removed observations did not reveal any strong correlations with airport choices or with key air travel characteristics. Two types of supplementary data also were assembled. Travel characteristics (both peak and offpeak) to each airport from all origin zones were obtained from the MTC regional model system data base. Air service characteristics at each airport were obtained from the Official Airline Guide (OAG) for the applicable period in August 1980. For each final flight destination found in the resident sample, the data obtained from the OAG included standard coach (Y Class) fare, number of nonstop flights, number of multi-stop direct flights, number of connecting flights (explicitly listed in the OAG), number of commuter flights, and the average flight time in each category. The MTC survey allowed eight trip purpose responses: convention, business, school, personal emergency, vacation, visiting, military leave, and other. Two categories clearly represent business travelers (business and convention) and two clearly represent nonbusiness travelers (vacation and visiting). The remaining purposes were included in the nonbusiness subsample. Of the total, 772 observations were business travelers and 1.087 were nonbusiness travelers. This split reflects the timing of the survey (during the peak vacation month). The Bay Area regional airport system is dominated by SFO. Of the 27.5 million passengers using Bay Area airports in 1980, 81% were at SFO, 9% were at OAK, and 10% were at SJC. SF0 attracted

Area. For this study, origin addresses by hand to census tracts. Observations

passengers from all over the region, while OAK primarily served nearby areas of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, and SJC served Santa Clara County and a small portion of southern Alameda County. The survey data do show that both OAK and (to a lesser extent) SJC attracted a small but measurable number of travelers from all over the region. Survey respondents were asked to state their principal reason for airport choice: For California Residents: Which of the following explains your main reason for choosing this airport? The answers included: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Chosen by travel agent or office; Closest airport to home; Closest airport to work; Only flight/most convenient flight; Easier to get to/from; More convenient/cheaper parking; Less crowded airport; Always use this airport.

Figures 2 and 3 summarize the results, by airport and trip purpose, for Bay Area residents. These results confirm the findings of earlier studies that air travelers place considerable importance on access time and flight frequency in their decisions. For example, between 74% and 84% of the respondents in each trip purpose/airport category indicated that access (near home, near work, and access) or frequency was their main criterion for airport selection. Figures 2 and 3 also shed some light on the relative importance of flight frequency and access time. Proximity is the dominant factor at OAK and SJC, for both business and nonbusiness travelers. At SFO, however, about as many travelers list frequency as the main criterion as list proximity. One

Agent

N Home

NWk

Flights

Access

Wrkm9

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Hoblt

(232)

(145)

(621)

Fig. 2. Reason for airport choice (resident business air passengers).

Airport

choice in a multiple airport region

443

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Fig. 3. Reason for airport choice (resident nonbusiness air passengers). would expect this in a situation where travelers are trading off time and schedule convenience (SF0 has higher frequencies to most destinations).
MODELS OF AIRPORT CHOICE FOR BAY AREA RESIDENTS

in model Bl the resident business travelers utility for SF0 is: U[SFO] = - .217 - .166*TT[SFO] +3.27*RF[SFO] + .0396*f(DF[SFO]).

(1)

Both the literature on air traveler behavior and tabulations from the Bay Area 1980 survey suggest that access time and schedule convenience are strong determinants of airport choice. Accordingly, attention was focused on these two variables in the development of model specifications for resident business travelers and resident nonbusiness travelers. One group of specifications treated the response to flight frequency as nonlinear, but represented response to access travel time as a linear function; a second group of specifications treated response to both frequency and travel time as nonlinear. The best models of each type are discussed here, along with variations in the treatment of variables where salient. The basic model structures in all cases is multinomial logit with three airport alternatives. Each alternative has a utility function which includes variables for access time and flight frequency, along with appropriate alternative-specific constants (which are presented as adjusted to account for the choice-based sample, mentioned above; see BenAkiva and Lerman [1985, p. 2371 for a discussion of this procedure). All models were estimated with a logit estimation computer package (Harvey, 1985) utilizing the exogenous sample maximum likelihood technique.
Airport choice for resident business travelers

Table 1 presents the estimation results for resident business travelers. These can be used to construct the logit utilities for each alternative. For example,

Travel time (T7) in this context serves as a proxy for the bundle of access characteristics at an airport. Since highway modes dominate the airport access market [Harvey, 19861, the appropriate peak or offpeak highway travel times (in minutes) from the regional network were used. An increment was added for parking time at each airport. In mode1 Bl, the travel time coefficient ( - .166) is large in comparison with typical urban travel choice models, indicating a strong relationship between proximity and airport choice. This is consistent with earlier findings (such as Kanafani, et al., 1975). Flight frequency appears in the specification in two different ways. Relative flight frequency (RF) is used to capture the information effects (e.g. increased advertising) of flight concentration at one airport. Absolute flight frequency (DF) is used as a direct indication of schedule convenience; more flights to a given destination imply a better match of flight times with desired departure times. Relative flight frequency was defined as the fraction of direct flights (as listed in the OAG) from each airport to the traveling partys destination, including multi-stop flights that did not require a change of plane. So-called connecting flights (i.e. with a change of plane) were not included in the count of flights, but were used in the absence of direct flights to determine whether a departure airport was available to the traveler. (By this criterion, Oakland was deemed unavailable to 7% of the business travelers).

444

G. HARVEY

Table 1. Resident business airport choice models Model Bl Variable Dum(SF0) Dum(OAK) TT TTs45 TT>45 &, Overall Statistics
N( SFO)

Model B2 Coeff. - .220 1.77 - .200 (1.57) (7.96) (-13.94) ( ,::;:; (5.17)

Coeff. - ,217 1.54 - .166 3.27 .0396 772 155 128 489 -840.4 - 710.6 - 202.8 .756

-3.64 .0818 .0418

N(OAK) N(SJC) LO L L Rhobar-squared

- 193.0 ,767

Definitions SFO, OAK, and SJC indicate airport alternatives as defined in the text (San Francisco International, Oakland International, and San Jose Municipal). Dum(i)-A constant term in the utility of alternative i. IT-The highway travel time from the traveling partys point of origin to each airport (minutes). 7T 5 45-Highway time up to and including the first 45 min of the trip (a cutoff determined empirically, as discussed in the text). 7T > 45-Highway access time above the first 45 min. RF-The relative frequency of flights to the traveling partys destination at each airport. Connecting and commuter flights are omitted. RF is the number of flights at a given airport divided by the sum of flights at all three airports. W-The daily frequency of flights at each airport to the traveling partys destination. Connecting flights are omitted, as are more than nine daily flights at a given airport (a cutoff determined empirically,

as discussed in the text). f(DF)-A parabolic function of DF, constrained to have its maximum at the cutoff point of DP
f(DF) = 29DF - DF.

of travelers in the sample choosing alternative i. Lo-The sample log-likelihood with all coefficients set to zero. P-The sample log-likelihood with all coefficients set to zero except the alternative specific constants. L*-The sample log-likelihood with the estimated coefficients. Rhobar-squared-tie adjusted likelihood ratio index. For model Bl, the estimated coefficient of RF was 3.27. For typical values of RF, the effect on airport attractiveness appears small in comparison with travel time. For example, a change from RF = .5 to RF = A could be offset by a 2 min decrease in access travel time. There are some theoretical reasons for omitting RF, including the simultaneity between aggregate shares and relative flight frequency, and the linear relation among RF values for a given traveler. However, tests of model Bl without RF showed virtually no effect on the remaining coefficients, suggesting that any specification error due to this variable does not influence the other coefficients. Direct flight frequency was included in the form of a parabolic variable to capture the decreasing headway advantage afforded by each additional flight. The steps leading to the parabolic form are worth describing because they shed light on the nature of the relationship between frequency and airport choice. Initially, DF was included as a single linear term without truncation, simply to gauge the average effect over the full range of frequency. Its estimated coefficient was negative. DFthen was broken into three variables based on the number of intermediate stops-zero, one, and two or more. The resulting coefficients were either negative or indeterminate. To better understand the basis for this outcome, DF (again aggregated to include all direct flights) was broken into three linear segments (with varying boundaries). Consistently, the segment coefficients revealed a decreasing marginal utility of frequency that actually became negative at very high frequencies. Since this could only result from an omitted negative attribute that is strongly correlated with high frequency (such as terminal congestion), it appeared necessary to exclude marginal values of DF above some truncation point. Various truncation values were tried, in conjunction with a Box-Tukey transform of DF to find the best nonlinear form below the truncation point (Hensher and Johnson, 1981, pp., 186-191). The approximately optimal Box-Tukey parameters strongly suggested a parabolic form, which was incorporated in Bl. With this specification, the optimal truncation point was nine flights per day.

N(i)-Number

Airport choice in a multiple airport region The model Bl function for direct frequency (.0396*[18*DF-OF]) demonstrates the decreasing marginal utility of flight frequency. It also highlights the importance of flight frequency vis-a-vis travel time. For example, according to this model, a change from zero to five direct flights (to a specific destination) would have the same effect on utility as 15.5 fewer min of access time (i.e. 2.57/.166 = 15.5). The model thus embodies a strong compensatory relation between access time and flight frequency. The estimated constants (adjusted) are .217 for SF0 and 1.54 for Oakland. There are a number of possible reasons for the nonzero constants in these models, and their relative size, including: (1) Airline fures. Fares have been omitted from this analysis because to a specific destination there is more variation among fare classes on a given flight than among flights or among airports, and because nothing is known about the fare actually paid by each traveler. At the time of the 1980 survey (before the full effects of deregulation), Oakland may have had a greater proportion of tourist and charter traffic and thus some price advantage not reflected in the models. (2) Availability of nonauto ground access. SF0 and (especially) Oakland are better served by public transit than San Jose, and SF0 is much better served by vans, shuttle services, limos, and the like than either of the other two. The use of highway data to represent access time ignores these distinctions. (3) Congestion at the airport terminals. By all accounts, some passengers found the terminals at SF0 crowded in 1980 (e.g. see Figs. 2 and 3). There is no question that high frequencies are associated with some kind of disutility (particularly at SFO), but to determine the source of this disutility (e.g. crowding within the terminals, delays due to airside congestion, etc.) would require substantial additional data collection. The resulting constants are not unusually large, representing the equivalent of 1.3 and 9.3 min of travel time savings, respectively. Nevertheless, they would be an important consideration in any forecasting application of the model, especially to a new airport (for which the appropriate constant would have to be inferred by analogy to an existing airport). The standard way of testing a logit model is to perform a likelihood ratio test against a nested specification (i.e. one with a subset of the variables in the model to be tested). The test measures the explanatory power of additional variables. The likelihood ratio statistic for model Bl against a model with constants only is 1016.0 with three degrees of freedom (the log-likelihood values for this computation are included in Table 1). The corresponding chi-squared (.Ol) value is 11.34. This is simply a formal expression of what is obvious from the estimation results: access time and frequency account for a large portion of the variation in observed air-

445

port choices. Indeed, the likelihood ratio index (.756) is large for a model of this type, indicating high correlation between predicted probabilities and observed choices. It is instructive to compare the frequency contribution to utility in model Bl with the frequency components of the aggregate models discussed in relation to previous work. Such a comparison is depicted in Fig. 4 (note that the relative frequency is held constant here). The results appear quite different at first glance, but in fact both of the earlier models could well be consistent with each other and with Bl, subject to certain conditions in the estimation data sets. Given the relationship shown by Bl, a data set dominated by high flight frequencies would be expected to produce a small linear frequency coefficient (such as the upper portion of the model Bl curve), while a data set reflecting daily frequencies between two and twelve might produce a linear coefficient close to the Kanafani and Ghobrial (1985) value. One feature of model Bl is that an airport without direct major airline service to a destination (but with connecting or commuter service) has little chance of being chosen by a traveler unless the access time differential strongly favors the inferior airport. This implies that connecting flights and commuter flights (either direct or connecting) add little to the attractiveness of an airport as long as an alternative airport with direct service exists. To further test this proposition, two variables representing connecting and commuter frequencies (as listed in the OAG) were added to the model, as fractions of the total number of flights of all types at an airport (to a specific destination). This yielded the following coefficients: Variable
Connect frequency Commuter frequency

Coefficient
-.909 -2.41

Estimated t
-1.56 - 1.42

Other coefficients were virtually identical to those in Table 1. The likelihood ratio statistic (versus model Bl) was 4.6, as compared with a chi-squared (. 10) value of 4.61. This suggests that at least a weak negative effect is present. Thus, it seems likely that the competitive situation of an airport without major direct service is slightly worse than model Bl indicates, and that connecting or commuter services of any type are substantially inferior to direct flights. While model Bls specification for access time produces a good t-statistic, and the overall model performs well statistically, the linear form used is a highly simplified representation of access characteristics. This may or may not be a limitation of the model, depending upon the cognitive processes followed by air travelers in making access and departure airport decisions. For example, if access mode and airport choices are closely related (i.e. airport choice is conditioned in part on modal availability and quality, and vice versa), then airport choices

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G. HARVEY

3 % z ._ = 2
nafani and Ghobnol, 1985

1
Kanafani, et al., 1975

10

12

14

16

16

Daily Flights

Fig. 4. Frequency components of three utility specifications. may reflect a detailed appreciation of access characteristics. On the other hand, if airport choices are based on only a general impression of modal availability and actual mode choices are settled close to the time of departure, highway travel time (as an approximate indicator of access time) may be an adequate representation of the information on access that enters the airport choice calculus. Full resolution of this issue is beyond the scope of the current paper. However, a number of related questions can be addressed within the general model framework presented here. One question derives from an earlier paper on access mode choice (Harvey, 1986), where a strong interaction was identified between length of flight and disutility of access travel time. Longer flights were associated with much larger (i.e. more negative) access time coefficients, possibly due to the increasingly severe consequences of missing a flight. If the access mode and airport choices are indeed closely related, then we can expect to find a similar effect in airport choice. This proposition was tested by estimating a variant of model Bl having two travel time coefficients: one for short-haul and one for long-haul. The break point was a flight time of two hours for the best flight available to a destination. The coefficients were: Variable Time, short-haul Time, long-haul Coefficient - .188 - .115 Estimated t - 14.19 -7.72 suggest that access mode choices are not made in a simple joint framework with airport choices. An important question concerns the functional form of the travel time variable. There are strong reasons to think that travel time, like frequency, should not enter the utility with a single linear coefficient. Air travelers show a willingness to opt for long access trips-two hours and more-in preference to use of a local airport with only connecting service. This is the case, for example, in Bakersfield, where many travelers choose to fly from the Los Angeles International Airport some two hours away rather than use local connecting flights. The functional relationship of access time to utility was explored through various nonlinear specifications in model B2. Initially, access time was broken into a number of segments with separate coefficients. Segment boundaries were varied to maximize the likelihood function. Estimation results for the best two-segment specification are shown in Table 1. This model shows improvement over Bl (according to the likelihood ratio test), with a strongly diminishing marginal disutility of travel time. As a variant of model B2, continuous representations were investigated using a Box-Tukey transform. Figure 5 depicts the travel time subfunction of utility for the best continuous specification (labeled variant l), along with the linear (Bl) and segmented (B2) versions. Statistically, the Box-Tukey variant performed slightly worse than the segmented specification of model B2. In general, airport choice for business travel was well explained by either model Bl or B2 without recourse to personal characteristics. This result may reflect the fact that business travelers are drawn from a narrow socio-economic range of the population, and for this reason personal characteristics appear to have little effect on airport choice. A number of models were estimated to test for hypothesized effects of personal characteristics such as income and

The dummy variables were nearly identical to those of model Bl, and the frequency coefficients lost about twenty % of their previous magnitudes. The rho-squared value was .765 and the log likelihood ratio (versus model Bl) was 15.0, compared with a chi-squared (.Ol) value of 6.64 for one degree of freedom. While there is clearly some correlation with frequency (a significant portion of the high frequency markets are also short-haul), these results

Airport choice in a multiple airport region

447

-9-+o-ll-12-13-14-is- 46- 17++ 0 10 20 30 40 60 60 70 60 90 Modal B2,Variant 1

Minutes ol AccessTime

Fig. 5. Time components of three utility specifications.

auto ownership. None yielded a significant improvement over models Bl or B2. A version of model Bl with a separate access time coefficient for those who said an agent chose the airport did indicate somewhat less sensitivity to access time among this group (- .136 vs. - .180), but neither the t-statistic for the difference in coefficients nor the likelihood ratio test was significant.
Airport choice for resident nonbusiness travelers

A parallel analysis was conducted for resident nonbusiness travelers. A comparison of Bl and NBl suggests major differences between business and nonbusiness travelers. Access time appears to be less important to the nonbusiness traveler, though it still exerts a strong effect. Direct flight frequency also appears to be less important to the nonbusiness traveler, though relative frequency has a similar coefficient. Experiments with frequency again showed a saturation level of about nine daily flights at an airport (i.e. the same as for business air travelers). The constant terms in NBl and Bl are very close, indicating about the same configuration of unexplained effects. Overall model statistics indicate that the explanatory power of the nonbusiness model is somewhat inferior to that of the business model, although it still shows good performance. The differences between the business and the nonbusiness travellers responses are consistent with a priori notions about travel behavior. First, since nonbusiness travel uses personal time, the applicable value of time would be expected to be lower. This would help to explain lower access travel time and flight frequency coefficients. Second, because nonbusiness travel uses personal funds, cost would be expected to exert greater influence on airport choice. Hence, the omission of a price variable may reduce the explanatory power of the model. Third, nonbusiness travelers simply may not behave in such an explicitly rational manner as business travelers. They

may not be as well informed or as experienced, thus lacking knowledge of airport options (e.g. trip frequency rates for business travelers are several times higher than for nonbusiness travelers); they may behave by habit, so that an airport used from one origin location in the past still might be used from less appropriate locations; or they may respond to advertising and other marketing tools by selecting otherwise inferior flight options. Any of these behavior patterns would reduce the explanatory power of a model explicitly incorporating only time and frequency variables. Model NB2 repeats the nonlinear access travel time specification. Unlike model B2, NB2 achieved only a minor improvement over the linear specification. A chi-squared test on the difference in loglikelihood between NB2 and NBl indicates significance at about the .07 level. The effect of income on travel time sensitivity was tested on the nonbusiness sample. Travel time variables were created for low (<$25K), middle ($25K40K), and high (>$40K) incomes. The results showed a slightly larger coefficient for high income than for the other brackets (which were not significantly different), but a poor likelihood ratio test (versus model NBl). Here, again, it was difficult to demonstrate any relationship between personal characteristics and airport choice. One final issue concerns the distinction between business and nonbusiness travelers. Differences in coefficient values appear to justify separate treatment, but this question can be addressed in a more rigorous way. The basic model (i.e. one with a linear access travel time specification as in Bl and NBl) was reestimated on the pooled sample (1,859 observations), yielding a log-likelihood of - 668.8 with five coefficients. The same specification estimated on the two samples separately yielded a total loglikelihood of - 658.5 with 10 coefficients (from Tables 1 and 2). The corresponding likelihood ratio

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G. HARVEY Table 2. Resident nonbusiness airport choice models Model NBl Variable Dum(SF0) Coeff. - .407 1.41 - ,120
2.95 .0176

Model NB2

t
(1.59) (10.19) (-21.61) (5.43) (3.41) 1087 238 249 600 - 1175. - 1072. -455.7 .610

Dum( OAK)
TT TT=45 TT>45 RF f(DF)

Coeff. - ,424 1.47 - ,128 - .0916 3.01 .0178

t
(1.64) (10.34)

(- 18.26)
(-6.84) (5.43) (3.42)

Overall Statistics Observations N( SFO) N(OAK) N(SJC) LO L L* Rhobar-squared

- 454.0

,611

Definitions: All items are defined as in Table 1

statistic is 20.6 with five degrees of freedom. This compares with a chi-squared (.Ol) value of 15.09. The separation of business and nonbusiness travelers appears warranted, although perhaps not as decisively as one might expect.

CONCLUSION

This paper has presented an analysis of airport choice by residents of the San Francisco Bay Area. The overriding conclusion is that a simple logit model based on two variables-airport access time and flight frequency to the chosen destination-provides a good approximation of airport choice behavior in the Bay Area sample, especially for business travelers. The analysis also points to a number of more specific conclusions: (1) In most circumstances, the attractiveness of an airport depends on the specific tradeoff between time and frequency faced by an air traveler. TWO extreme cases allow some generalization. Given an adequate number of flights to a destination at each of two competing airports (nine or more, in this case), the closest airport virtually always will be chosen (all other things being equal). Conversely, in competition with a major airport, a facility with little or no direct service will be bypassed even with substantially shorter access times; (2) Beyond a threshold level, additional direct flights to a specific destination do not appear to make an airport more attractive. In the Bay Area data, this threshold is nine flights per day for both business and nonbusiness travelers. The marginal contribution of each additional direct flight decreases up to nine flights per day. This conclusion does not rule out secondary effects of frequency on airport attractiveness, such as the benefit of more seat departures in a market where capacity lags behind

growth in demand. These phenomena simply were not the focus of the present study; (3) Both connecting and commuter flights appear to be poorly regarded by air travelers who have the option of selecting a departure airport with direct service; (4) NO effect of nonstop versus multi-stop direct flights could be discerned. In the choice of airport, the schedule convenience conferred by additional direct flights appears to override the time spent on the ground at interim points; (5) The marginal disutility of access time appears to decrease with total time; (6) The response to access time appears to vary with the length of the flight; short-haul flights have greater access time sensitivity than long-haul flights; (7) Airport choice does not appear to take place jointly with access mode choice. The choice behavior of the nonbusiness traveler differs significantly from that of the business traveler. Both frequency and access time are less important. In all cases, the above conclusions apply both to business and to nonbusiness travelers, albeit with less confidence in the latter case. It is possible that other factors may influence nonbusiness airport choice behavior, perhaps including ticket prices, availability and timing of charter flights, marketing effects, and other aspects of information availability. It also is possible that business travel decisions are based on better knowledge and follow a more explicit calculus than nonbusiness decisions. The results of this study point to a number of directions for future work;

(1) extending the analysis to include lower-level choices such as access mode in a nested logit framework;

Airport choice in a multiple airport region

449 work was supported in part by

(2) extending the analysis to non-residents. This would yield a full set of models for building a simulation of a regional airport system; (3) estimating the same (or similar) models on data for other area and time periods. This would provide some evidence on the generalizability of the findings reported here; (4) estimating similar and more sophisticated models on more detailed data, such as a larger sample with adequate representation of costs, chosen fare categories, exact destination locations, and time of day preferences; (5) designing and conducting special studies of air travelers to develop a better understanding of their travel decision processes, of the nature of their time sensitivity, and of the relationship between regional airport system characteristics and the demand for air travel. This is a long-term research agenda, but one with a high potential payoff. Air transport is essential to personal mobility and to productive activity. While knowledge about the users of air transportation has progressed in the last two decades, there remains much to learn about the behavior of air travelers and about the effect of this behavior on the structure and evolution of the air transport system.

Acknowledgements-This

the National Science Foundation under grant CEE 8307967.

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