Abstract:
Railway is a mass transit system, which has high ridership potential. Compare to other competitive
mode of transportation for long distance travel, train is inexpensive, takes smaller space and haul
large number of passengers. Since, train has separate right of way, it does not interfere or share with
other modes. Railway is an effective congestion reliving alternative. Bangladesh is a developing
country and train is the most preferred public transit mode for public. It is essential to assess
preference sensitivity of train. Several factors can influence train mode choice. Those are—departure
time (DT), train fare (TF), travel time (TT) and service quality (SQ). The study investigated
sensitivity of these factors over train ridership. We carried out a question survey on 130 passengers
on two different routes, Dhaka to Sylhet and Dhaka to Rajshahi. Almost half of the passengers are
income within 30-60k BDT per month. Almost 40% of the respondents are captive train rider in this
study. Our study found that increase of departure time and travel time delay <30 minutes have very
small influence on ridership. However, ridership decreases very rapidly with the increase of
departure time and increase of travel time delay more than 30 minutes. All of the factors of ridership
are linearly related with %ridership. Service quality of train is categorized into scale 1 to 4. 1 stands
for AC train service with no standing passengers, whereas, 4 stands for non-AC train service with
large standing passengers. Ridership declining straightly with the lowering service quality (SQ). 10%
increase in departure time will decrease ridership by 14% and 10% increase in fare will decrease
ridership by 6%. %Ridership has little influence, if fare increase is <50 BDT. However, if train fare
increased by 100 BDT or more, the reduction of %ridership is very high and people are reluctant to
travel on train. From our study since the above-mentioned factors have strong influence on train
ridership, therefore, it provides fruitful information on strategic planning to promote train service.
