The purpose of this paper is to present the initial stages of a survey of the importance placed by freight consignors on various aspects of freight services such as cost, delivery, time, reliability, collection frequency and number of lifts. Stated preference (SP) techniques are being used, and this paper describes the new technique designed especially for use with freight transport mode choice experiments where large variations in conditions are encountered. Sixty distribution managers of chocolate and sugar confectioners manufacturing companies are being interviewed using an interactive portable microcomputer program which decides the values of the next stage of options to be presented to the interviewer on the basis of the ranking of options for the previous set. Details of the sampling strategy, the stated preference exercise and the results of the analysis of the SP results obtained so far are presented.
Abstract