Changes in City Residents' Support for the National Highway Toll-free Policy and Their Travel Behavior: The Case of Suzhou.

The toll-free highway policy implemented for the first time in China during 2012 has greatly stimulated people's enthusiasm for travel. This policy is promoting the holiday tourism market, especially the self- driving tour market, but this development has at the same time also brought many negative effects, including overcrowded highways, increased levels of traffic accidents, and a decline in the quality of tourism travel. Based on an extensive literature review we developed a questionnaire to seek information on 17 perceptual factors which reflect the influence of the highway free policy, 2 factors which reflect the degree of support for the policy, and 4 factors which reflect the desire to travel again. From this investigation, we construct a hypothetical structural equation model of city residents' perception of the support for the highway free policy and their travel behavior. This model is based on exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and longitudinal studies of the changes in the correlation between resident perceptions and their support for the policy after the Spring Festival and the National Day in 2013, and the level of subsequent travel behavior, with confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of the survey data. The results show that: (1) travel quality has the strongest correlation with policy support, and this correlation improved in both the Spring Festival and National Day in 2013; (2) public service capacity and the perceptions of hidden dangers are important factors influencing the level of support. In our study the influence of public service capacity-which includes rescue system of high speed road, information release of traffic and road condition and traffic warning mechanism, decreased slightly and the influence of hidden dangers increased; (3) the correlation between travel cost and support is weakened by this policy. However, the correlation between perceptions of fairness and policy support increased, but not significantly; (4) as the intermediary variable between resident perceptions and further travel decisions, support for this policy has an increased mediating effect; and (5) compared with the Spring Festival, the mediating effect of support which influenced tourist behavior became more obvious after National Day. Our study of the changes in city residents' support for the highway toll-free policy and their travel behavior will help to perfect the policy. The required changes are: (1) to improve the travel quality from the aspects of scenic area capacity control, tourist dispersion, stronger supervision of the industry, improvements in supporting facilities, and strengthening environmental protection consciousness; (2) the government should improve information distribution channels and strengthen the number and quality of emergency rescue teams; and (3) the vigorous development of the smarter tourism system to control tourist capacity. This is needed first to publish real time tourist and traffic flow information at main destinations and attractions and on access roads through the official WeChat and MicroBlog social media, and second, to use a variety of methods of ticket purchasing to monitor tourist flows effectively and reduce waiting times; (4) to strengthen the construction of the self- drive tourism support system. On one hand, cities and scenic areas should accelerate the construction of a self-drive tourism system. On the other hand, the government should encourage the development and standardization in the car rental industry; (5) to establish tourism security rescue centers to enhance the speed and timeliness of traffic vehicle breakdown rescue and medical relief, and pay more attention to the spread of high-speed travel safety knowledge to enhance travel security; (6) to perfect supporting policies for the highway toll- free policy, such as implementing the paid vacation system to ensure that workers have more discretionary time to travel in addition to"Golden Week"; and (7) through the passenger bus toll-free policy reduce bus ticket prices to expand the scope of the toll-free policy objective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]