Exploring the role of social capital influence variables on travel behaviour Draft paper for Transportation Research A, 2014 Floridea Di Ciommo*, Julio Comendador TRANSyT Transport Research Centre, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid E-mails: floridea.diciommo@upm.es; jcomendador@caminos.upm.es María Eugenia López-Lambas Department of Civil Engineering: Transport, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid E-mail: mariaeugenia.lopez@upm.es Elisabetta Cherchi DTU Transport, Technical University of Denmark E-mail: elich@transport.dtu.dk Juan de Dios Ortúzar Department of Transport Engineering and Logistics,Centre for Urban Sustainable Development (CEDEUS) Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, E-mail: jos@ing.puc.cl ABSTRACT This paper explores the potential role of individual trip characteristics and social capital network variables in the choice of transport mode. A sample of around 100 individuals living or working in one surrounding area of Madrid (i.e. Las Rosas district of Madrid) participated in a smartphone short panel survey, entering their travel data for an entire working week. A Mixed Logit model was estimated with this data to analyse shifts towards metro. Apart from classical explanatory variables, such as travel time and cost, gender, license and car ownership, the model also incorporated two “social capital network” variables: participation in voluntary activities and receiving help for various tasks (i.e. child care, housekeeping, etc.). Both variables improved the capacity of the model to explain transport mode shifts. Further, our results confirm that the shift towards metro was higher in the case of people ”helped” and lower for those participating in some voluntary activities. Keywords: Social capital influence - Travel behaviour- New transport policy – Mode choice *corresponding author