This paper summarises the results of an investigation into the effect of differences in bus services levels on patterns of travel by bus and other modes. It is based on analysis of data from the 1978/9 National Travel Survey, large scale on-bus surveys in Aberdeen and Swansea, a home interview survey in Luton, and an in-depth survey of bus users in Oxford. The paper sets out elasticities and other relationships between bus use and (1) service frequency (or headway) and (2) walk time to bus stop (or route density), for various sub-groups of people with different socio-economic characteristics, and for people making different types of journey. Bus use is strongly related to service headway and less so to walk distance from home to bus stop. Thus people are generally willing to travel further to a bus stop route with a better service - though this varies by type of person and trip purpose. Most of the variation in bus use is associated with different proportions of the population using buses, rather than differences in intensities of bus use per passenger. The best estimate of the elasticity for service headway is in the range - 0.5 to - 0.6. The value is very low for retired people and high for car owners and males; it is generally high at weekends. The elasticity for walk distance to bus stop is much lower (- 0.09 to - 0.20); again it is higher for males and licence holders, but it is also higher for old people. However, the elasticity for walk distance at both ends of a journey is much higher, at about - 0.5. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for bus operators and others involved in planning bus services.
Samenvatting