The abstract The present study attempts to explore the influence of socio-demographic and activity-travel participation variables on mode choice of the new railway development for inter-city travel in the eastern part of Indonesia, namely Makassar-Parepare Line. The study carried out an interview survey on private car passengers, who have conducted travel for Makassar-Parepare route. A statistical descriptive analysis approach was applied to show the influence of the variables for the mode choice phenomenon of the travelers. The analysis results show that the socio-demographic variables more influence than the activity-travel variables on the mode choice behavior for the intercity travelers. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021.