Estimating the passenger cost of station crowding.

To develop some understanding of how Sydney rail users value station crowding, RailCorp NSW undertook a Stated Preference survey of passengers in 2003. The aim of the survey was to derive crowding costs for time spent on platform, access-way and entrance station areas under low, medium and high crowding situations. This paper summarises the survey approach (Section 2) and results (Section 3). Section 4 fits the survey results into a formula developed by London Underground which expresses crowding cost as a function of passenger density. A simple example of increased platform area is used in Section 5 to illustrate how the formula can be used to evaluate the passenger benefits of reduced crowding. Some concluding remarks are made in section 6. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E213716.