New Insights in Resistance to Interchange

Abstract Train passengers experience an interchange between trains in their trip as a nuisance. To model this resistance, a penalty is usually added in the calculation of the perceived journey time. For many years, NS and ProRail used a fixed penalty of 10 minutes per interchange for rail trips in the Netherlands. This penalty was based on expert-judgement. A stated preference survey in 2011 [De Keizer et al., 2012, customer resistance to interchanges, ETC Glasgow] demonstrates that customers experience a much higher penalty than 10 minutes. The penalty also strongly differs with characteristics of their transfer, like transfer time, frequency of the connecting service and whether the transfer is cross platform or not. Recently, the SP data have been re-analyzed, based on the recommendations of an audit on the 2011 work. This new analysis shows that a reference penalty is 23 minutes (including 2 minutes transfer time), which is more than twice as high as the current value. However, under certain optimal circumstances, the penalty can be lower than 14 minutes. Comparing the findings with earlier results and findings from international literature shows a similar dependence between punctuality, the connection time and the frequency of the connecting train in all studies. The added value of the new survey is a more detailed analysis of the importance of the various aspects of interchanges between trains. The outcomes of the new analysis have been compared with real-world data. This comparison showed that using the new values led to a much better fit with reality. For example, growth rates of various direct connections to Schiphol Airport were 30-100% higher in reality than had been predicted with the fixed 10 minutes penalty. Applying the new differentiated penalty led to a forecast with a maximum deviation of only 15% compared with the real-world figures.