Three Types of Passengers on One Platform: Who Leaves the Station and How
The train pulls into the station. Doors slide open, and the crowd spills onto the platform. From there, everyone goes their own way: some head for the bike racks, some dive into the underpass toward the bus, and some just walk to the exit. This final stretch, from the train door to the door of home or office, often decides whether people take the train at all. In the Netherlands, only 19% of the population lives within a kilometer of a station, and 69% within 5 km. So for most, a train trip doesn't end on the platform.
An interpreter gets distracted by every rustle in the hall, and a one-hour meeting stretches into two. Same here: a poorly organized "last kilometer" can ruin the whole journey. To understand how passengers choose their way from the station to their destination, researchers surveyed 1,891 Dutch residents. Each was asked to choose among six options: walking, bus/tram/metro, shared bike, e-bike, e-scooter, or e-moped. The options varied in travel time, waiting time, price, parking type, and rental type. The experiment was repeated for three distances (1, 4, 7 km), three train ride durations (15, 45, 75 minutes), and two trip purposes (work/study or leisure).
The analysis identified three passenger types. The first is multimodal enthusiasts, making up 58%. They aren't tied to any particular mode and pick whichever is faster and cheaper. They're willing to pay up to 4.21 euros extra for a free service. The second type is skeptical cyclists, 16%. They strongly prefer their own bike but are open to shared services if they're safe and simple; they value free access at 1.81 euros. The third type is sharing-averse public transport users, 27%. They choose bus or tram and avoid shared scooters, finding them complicated and dangerous; they'd pay 1.41 euros extra for staff presence at parking facilities.
Walking is most popular for distances up to 2 km. For 5–10 km, bikes and buses compete. Interestingly, introducing additional shared services mainly draws users away from existing shared bikes, not from buses. This means simply adding an e-bike won't necessarily increase the share of car-free trips; it just redistributes users.
This work is the first to compare four types of shared modes for the egress leg and to account for system parameters like parking and rental type. It gives station operators a tool to decide which service to launch based on demand and distances. The next step is to repeat the survey including car drivers who rarely take the train, and to give respondents the option to skip the train trip altogether. This would allow estimating how many people could be shifted from cars to a train-plus-shared-transport combination. The question remains open: how to bridge the gap between stated preferences and actual behavior, since people say one thing in surveys but do another. Segmentation by sharing readiness may help, but data on actual service usage is needed.
Three types of passengers on one platform: each looking for their own way to leave the station. And now we know how to help them.
In the Netherlands, there are more bicycles than residents, but only about 10% of regular train passengers have a second bike at the arrival side. The OV-fiets shared bike service, launched in 2008, has grown to 300 stations and 5.9 million trips per year.