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https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/27432/critical-issues-in-transportation-for-2024-and-beyond

Placing a value on overcrowding and other rail service quality factors

The West Midlands Passenger Transport Executive (CENTRO) are responsible for improving passenger services and accommodating growth, in line with their Business Plan and wider Centro objectives, within the constraints of Network Rail views on available capacity. This paper looks at a Stated Preference (SP) study undertaken by Mott MacDonald and Faber Maunsell to assess how West Midlands passengers (rail users and non rail users) value and trade off rail service reliability, frequency and travel in less crowded conditions. A comprehensive assessment was conducted which involved a reviewof other research carried out looking at these service attributes including evidence from sources such as Passenger Demand Forecasting Handbook. Aswell as providing evidence of current valuations of these attributes, thereview also provided an insight into how these attributes have been represented in other SP studies. The results of the survey showed that overcrowding on trains happens more regularly than unreliability or poor frequencyand that overcrowding has got much worse over the last 12 months when compared to unreliability and poor frequency. Interestingly however, the findings highlighted that change in behaviour and mode of transport (transfer to car/bus) was more likely to occur if unreliability and poor frequency increase than if overcrowding increases. This was further reflected by respondents current behaviour where the majority said they had not used other modes of transport as a result of overcrowding. Qualitative research usingfocus groups (with users and non users) were also carried out to explore how travellers think about, and trade off, overcrowding, reliability and service frequency and to test different methods for exploring these issues in SP experiments. The results of this survey gave some valuable insights which were subsequently fed into the SP survey. As with the internal survey, overcrowding was ranked as the most important issue among rail users. For all, overcrowding comes down to one thing not having a seat. However, user participants did not always see standing as overcrowding but they defined different levels of standing which defined overcrowding: people standing in centre aisles, people standing in vestibule, people standing so thataccess to doors/aisles is blocked and, standing without being able to move as a result of no room space. For most participants, overcrowding is mainly as a result of unreliability combined with no extra carriages added asa result and unsurprisingly, unreliability was where they felt it was most important to make improvements. A full Stated Preference survey was carried out with around 800 rail users to establish the penalties for, and trade offs between, crowding, reliability and frequency. The survey also collected detailed information on rail user journeys, attitudes and demographic information. Self-complete post back questionnaires were distributed at 6 stations in the West Midlands. The resulting models were well defined and presented plausible values which compare well with other research carried out in this area. The SP models provided values of four different crowding levels and a value of expected lateness which are very similar to that currently recommended by the Passenger Demand Forecasting Handbook. For the covering abstract see ITRD E137145.

  • Authors:
    • BAKER, J
    • MYERS, N
    • MURPHY, P
  • Publication Date: 2007

Language

  • English

Media Info

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01100062
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Source Agency: TRL
  • Files: ITRD
  • Created Date: May 27 2008 9:34AM