Modal split models are normally used to evaluate the effect of shortening the railway travel time. When the shortened time is relatively small, however, the values estimated by the models are thought to be too large. Because people perceive sensory changes logarithmically, they do not notice the difference if a relative change is smaller than a certain value. Unless a person recognizes that the travel time has ben shortened, he or she does not change his or her modal choice act. In other words, the value estimated by a model should be modified. Therefore, we conducted a questionnaire survey to grasp the percentage of the shortened time being recognized as significant. As a result, it became clear that the percentage of the positive recognition of the change is rather small when the shortened time is less than 10 minutes. The percentage of positive recognition is significantly large in the case where the integer number of hours decreases. We proposed a new method to evaluate the effect for the case where the shortened time is relatively small. A case study by the new method is also shown.

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