Cities in industrialized countries are increasingly confronted with the negative consequences of car use growth, resulting in traffic jams and parking problems. One way to reduce these problems is to realize transfer points at the city edge, where car users can switch to public transport. However, recently realized transfer points in the Netherlands do not attract many car users. The planning of more frequently used transfer points obviously requires a better understanding of the car users' preferences. Often the stated preference (SP) approach is applied for this purpose. However, the number of attributes that potentially influence the preferences on transfer systems is too large to handle in traditional SP experiments. As a solution to this problem, hierarchical information integration (HII) method has been developed in the past. HII assumes that individuals first group the attributes into higher order decision constructs, then evaluate each decision construct separately and finally integrate these evaluations into an overall preference or choice. Accordingly, an experiment is constructed for each decision construct, which requires that attributes are grouped to define that construct. This is so far always performed by the researcher. Hence, to attain potentially more valid results the grouping of attributes should be based on empirical data. In this paper, the authors develop and apply such an empirically based grouping procedure and present the results of an internet-based survey completed by potential users of transfer points. (A) For the covering abstract of the conference see ITRD E206647.
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