Waiting time for ferry services: empirical evidence from norway

Abstract Providing good estimations of travel time is important when calculating travel demand and the user benefit of infrastructure projects. Waiting time is a key component of travel time estimates for projects involving ferry services, such as frequency changes or ferry replacement projects. The objective of this paper is to analyse the relationship between observed waiting time and service frequency. Furthermore, the influence of different characteristics of ferry services on waiting time is investigated. This paper analyses observed vehicle arrivals for five car ferry services in Norway, with >92,000 total observations. Descriptive statistics and linear regression are used to analyse the data and observe the relationship between waiting time and service frequency. Furthermore, a travel survey was conducted on four of the ferry services during the observation period. The survey contributes characteristics of the passengers and trip purpose that might explain the differences in waiting time seen in the data. The analysis shows that passengers tend to adjust more to the scheduled departure as the time between ferry departures (denoted as headway) increases. Hence, the ratio of the mean waiting time to headway decreases with increasing headway. Furthermore, the observed mean waiting time is greater for national highway routes than for local ferry services. The findings contribute to the research by quantifying the inconvenience caused by being dependent on a ferry service. The results provide recommendations regarding the magnitude of observed waiting times, which also contributes to research on other components of this inconvenience.