An Analytical Study Of The Factors Affecting The Demand For Public Transportation (A Case Study Of The City Of Damascus And Its Countryside)

Abstract

Transportation sector is one of the basic fundamentals of the economic and social development process in most third world countries, which is considered as the nucleus of the infrastructure that serves the development process, and this development process is based on effective and sustainable transportation network planning, which is mainly related to the transportation demand, and it is also associated with the use of the land.

Damascus city is a city that has very deep historical roots and undergoing urban expansion, it is connected to the surrounding areas and far away by a transportation network, which caused a huge gap between supply and demand especially in the transportation network between the city and the rural areas. Among the transportation problems, primarily traffic congestion, long waiting time, delays, difficult driving, fatigue and psychological pressure on the drivers and users.

In this article, we will focus on determining the factors that have an affection on the public transportation between Damascus and its countryside and the relationship between them.

The demographic and transportation data were taken from the population areas that located on the axes of the roads linking the city of Damascus and its countryside and represented by )microbus - internal transportation bus) for the time period from 1998-2010, and the analysis was done using the Eviews program, it was found that the most influential factors are population density, the number of the employee and the quality of the service, while the impact of the income and the public transportation fare was less.