Priority areas of intervention for development of walking, bicycling and motorized feeder facilities as first-and-last mile connectivity with metro stations

The present work aims to identify the priority areas of interventions for the development of facilities so that the sustainable modes such as walking, cycling, and battery operated motorized IPT facilities are utilized as the first-and-last mile connectivity with the metro stations. The work is demonstrated with respect to a satellite city of Kolkata Metropolitan city which is soon going to be served by metro railway service. Attributes related to safety, security, service characteristics and infrastructural facilities have been selected from literature review and expert opinions which have been ranked by the users according to their importance perception. RIDIT analysis was used to obtain the importance ranking of these attributes. Finally, the heterogeneity in the importance perception of the attributes based on the socio-economic and trip characteristics of the users have been studied. Safety and security attributes achieved highest importance and the basic infrastructural facilities are found to be moderately important to most of the users for all the modes. Age, income, gender and educational background of the commuters are the socio-economic characteristics whereas trip purpose, public transport users, frequency of travel and distance of FLM are the trip characteristics which influence the importance perception of the commuters significantly.