The effect of unreliable travel conditions on the need for advanced public transport information services. This paper reports on a stated choice experiment examining the need and willingness to pay for advanced public transport information services. Intercity train travelers are asked to choose among information services that varied in type of information provided by the services, precision of provided dynamic times, whether or not the service can provide information unasked for and price. The respondents made these choices conditional on a specified context, denoting the level of unreliability in travel conditions. This unreliability was indicated by no transfer, transfer to a high frequency connection, and transfer to a low frequency connection. The modeling results indicate that as hypothesized, more unreliable travel conditions induce a larger need for travel information, a higher preference for services that can provide advice and a higher willingness to pay for information. However, the choice for information services is highly price sensitive, which suggest a low willingness to pay in general. (Author/publisher)
Abstract