A research to evaluate airline passengers' high speed train use preferences in Turkey

Technological development in air transportation has enabled costs and therefore ticket prices to decrease, so that the number of passengers traveling by air in Turkey has increased significantly. Likewise, High Speed Rail (HSR) transportation operating on similar lines is an important alternative for passengers. In this study, it is aimed to determine the factors affecting the transportation mode choice of airline passengers and to reveal the airline passengers' perspective on HSR transportation by using the correlational research method. Within the scope of this research, a survey was conducted on 407 airline passengers. After exploratory factor analysis, travel-related criteria affecting passengers' preference for high-speed train transportation were grouped under 3 factors: travel factor, train factor and 'safety and comfort factor'. Status of 12 independent variables (gender, age, travel frequency, education level, income level, purchaser (who bought the ticket), travel purpose, total number of people traveled, previous HSR experience status, travel factor, train factor, 'safety and comfort factor') on affecting passengers' preferences and their impact levels were determined by binary logistic regression analysis. As a result, it was revealed that age, income, education, train factor, previous HSR experience status and travel frequency variables significantly affects the passengers' preferences. The main reasons why passengers prefer air transportation are speed, comfort, and habit. In addition, some of the passengers stated that although they prefer to travel by HSR, they traveled by air because there was no train service at the desired time, or they couldn't find a train ticket (occupancy), or they have connected flight at the destination. While airline and HSR transportation can be seen as competing modes of transportation for a particular line, they have complementary features when evaluated within a broader network structure. For this reason, the development of systems that include common ticket and transportation integration for the cooperation of these two transportation types will be in favor of both passengers and businesses in the long term.