Abstract Manager

Travel mode and route choices are shaped by a wide range of interacting factors, including individual characteristics such as age, gender, income, occupation, perceptions, and attitudes; environmental features such as urban density, proximity to activity centers, walkability, and transport infrastructure; as well as trip-specific attributes including travel time, waiting time, number of transfers, comfort, and congestion (de Oña & de Oña, 2023; Ranjan & Sinha, 2025; Redman et al., 2013).

Beyond these determinants, understanding travel behavior also requires assessing the quality and diversity of the alternatives offered by a public transport system. The presence of multiple routes between an origin and a destination has important implications for user choice. These alternatives can respond to different users preferences (Nassir et al., 2016), their partial knowledge of the service, and improving the resilience of the network (Lee & Miller, 2020). From a planning and policy perspective, the ability to systematically characterize these alternatives is essential for evaluating network design, identifying service gaps, and assessing how well public transport systems accommodate heterogeneous travel needs (Frappier et al., 2018; Nassir et al., 2016).

This presentation introduces a set of novel indicators designed to evaluate both the quality and the diversity of public transport alternatives, providing planners and decision-makers with a structured framework to support evidence-based network planning and policy interventions. This work addresses the following research question: how can the diversity of viable routes offered by a public transport network be quantified in an intuitive and data-driven manner, and what does this reveal about network robustness and planning needs?

To answer this question, we propose an approach relying on non-parametric empirical distributions and probabilistic dominance to identify a user-optimal frontier. Two complementary indicators are derived from this framework: a quality score, reflecting the likelihood that a given route lies close to the user-optimal frontier, and a diversity index, capturing the extent to which genuinely distinct alternatives exist between different origin–destination pairs.

The proposed methodology is applied to the territory of the Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain in the Montreal region, using data from the most recent household mobility survey, Perspective Mobilité 2023. The indicators are analyzed at both the origin–destination pair level and the transport analysis zone level, enabling the identification of areas where improvements in route quality and network robustness are needed. This multi-scale analysis supports targeted planning interventions aimed at strengthening the resilience and effectiveness of the public transport network.

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Frappier, A., Morency, C., & Trépanier, M. (2018). Measuring the quality and diversity of transit alternatives. Transport Policy, 61, 51‑59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tranpol.2017.10.007

Lee, J., & Miller, H. J. (2020). Robust accessibility : Measuring accessibility based on travelers’ heterogeneous strategies for managing travel time uncertainty. Journal of Transport Geography, 86, 102747. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2020.102747

Nassir, N., Hickman, M., Malekzadeh, A., & Irannezhad, E. (2016). A utility-based travel impedance measure for public transit network accessibility. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 88, 26‑39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2016.03.007

Ranjan, R., & Sinha, S. (2025). A systematic review of mode choice behavior in urban transportation with emphasis on individual preferences and influencing factor. Discover Cities, 2(1), 98. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-025-00138-3

Redman, L., Friman, M., Gärling, T., & Hartig, T. (2013). Quality attributes of public transport that attract car users : A research review. Transport Policy, 25, 119‑127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tranpol.2012.11.005