The Santiago Panel: measuring the effects of implementing Transantiago

Abstract

Although panels offer significant advantages over cross sectional data especially in terms of evaluating the effects of significant policy changes, there are precious few examples of panels built around an important change to an urban transport system. For this reason we took the opportunity of the introduction of Transantiago, a radically new public transport system for Santiago de Chile in February 2007, to form a panel, the first wave of which was taken in December 2006. The final objective was to use this Santiago Panel to estimate mode choice models considering both inertia and policy effects.
This document describes both the design and construction of the panel, and presents some results based on an analysis of its four waves; for example, we registered a high percentage of mode change (55.1%) attributable to the introduction of the new system. The panel can claim the highest response rate (or lowest attrition) reported in the literature (95% in the second wave, 92% in the third one, and 85% in the forth one). This hints at the possibility of developing sophisticated models to evaluate the effects of a system shock in the presence of inertia in decision making.