Passenger Switch Behavior and Decision Mechanisms in Multimodal Public Transportation Systems

Efficient public transportation systems are fundamental to achieving sustainable urban development. As the backbone of urban mobility, the coordinated development of rail transit and bus systems is crucial. The opening of a new rail transit line inevitably reshapes urban travel patterns, posing significant challenges to the existing bus network. Understanding passenger switch behavior is key to optimizing the competition and cooperation between these two modes. However, existing methods on the switch behavior of bus passengers along the newly opened rail transit line cannot balance the predictive accuracy and model interpretability. To bridge this gap, we propose a CART (classification and regression tree) decision tree-based switch behavior model that incorporates both predictive and interpretive abilities. This paper uses the massive passenger swiping-card data before and after the opening of the rail transit to construct the switch dataset of bus passengers. Subsequently, a data-driven predictive model of passenger switch behavior was established based on a CART decision tree. The experimental findings demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, with the CART model achieving an overall prediction accuracy of 85%, outperforming traditional logit and other machine learning benchmarks. Moreover, the analysis of factor significance reveals that ‘Transfer times needed after switch’ is the dominant feature (importance: 0.52), and the extracted decision rules provide clear insights into the decision-making mechanisms of bus passengers.