Towards a better understanding of trip satisfaction, behavior and needs among different groups of population over time.

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Many of the most important challenges facing transport planners and engineers in the 21st century involve ensuring that benefits of development and growth are equitably shared among various groups within society. Transportation systems are increasingly expected to provide societal benefits well beyond mobility: reduction of green-house gas emissions, provision of equitable access to all groups; reduction of social exclusion; maximize benefits to individuals; ensuring satisfaction among commuters of different modes, and neighbourhood liveability. However, how to understand, measure, and model these benefits is not always clear and is a challenge that many practitioners are facing. The long term goal of my program is to generate valuable research in the above mentioned area that will have a real world impact. My second long term goal is to keep providing local, national and international transport agencies and firms with highly qualified personnel. In doing so my program includes several studies that will help me in reaching my goals. The first study involves modeling accessibility over time to better understand how households of different socio-economic status "respond" to changes in local and regional accessibility. The second project identifies met and unmet transport needs of seniors living in Montreal. While the third develops methodologies to better understand levels of satisfaction with trips among active transport users (public transit, cyclists, and walkers) while controlling for attitudes and habits. The fourth and final is developing a better transit market segmentation based on analysis of large scale surveys. The proposed research program is expected to have various impacts in the transport engineering and planning field. First, it will continue our efforts towards training highly qualified personnel, which is something that my group has been successful in doing over the past five years where I have trained and supported 24 different students. Second, the research will try to answer several research questions that are not only important for the transportation researchers, but are of utmost importance to practitioners in Canada (Engineers and Planners) as they are striving to provide better transport systems to Canadians.