Waiting Time in Ferry Services: An Empirical Study from a Norwegian Context

Providing good estimations of travel time is an important variable when calculating travel demand and user benefit of infrastructure projects. Waiting time is one important variable in projects involving fixed links replacing ferries or changes in ferry frequency. The objective of this paper is to analyse the relationship between observed waiting time and service frequency. Furthermore, the influence on waiting time due to different characteristics of the ferry service is also investigated. The paper analyses observed vehicle arrivals in five ferry services in Norway, with more than 60,000 observations in total. Descriptive statistics and histograms are used to analyse the two most common headways for each ferry service. Furthermore, a travel survey was conducted on four of the ferry services during the observation period, giving information about trip purpose. The analysis show that passengers tend to adjust to scheduled departure as headway increases. Hence, the ratio between mean waiting time and headway decreases with increasing headway. Furthermore, observed mean waiting time are larger on national highway routes than local ferry services. The findings contribute to the research on the inconvenience cost by being dependent on a ferry service. The results give advice of the magnitude of observed waiting time, which contributes to the research on the different components of the inconvenience cost

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP085 Standing Committee on Ferry Transportation.
• Authors:
  • Andersen, Stig Nyland
  • Tørset, Trude
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
• Date: 2018

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 13p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Empirical methods; Estimating; Ferries; Ferry service; Travel demand
• Uncontrolled Terms: Waiting time (Transit riders)
• Geographic Terms: Norway
• Subject Areas: Marine Transportation; Planning and Forecasting;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01662727
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 18-01401
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 16 2018 9:51AM