The economic value of timetable changes

Abstract The paper addresses the consumer value of changes in service frequency for timetable-based transport systems such as bus, train, ferry and air transport. Instead of using “average waiting times” we propose a more appropriate model specification of the different impacts of timetable changes for individual travellers. This includes a decision whether to plan the journey or not, and (if planning) when to start the journey as a function of the services available. We also address the issue of how to aggregate the individual values across the travelling population to obtain estimates of total welfare. Because there is significant variation in preferences between individual travellers, logsum-type measures are used to derive expected utilities rather than mean values. We end our paper by illustrating the application of our method for a rail service.