When Public Transport Administrations propose changes in fare schemes or increased fares, they are often met with concerns regarding the proposed fare schemes fairness. Implicit in these concerns is an understanding of relations governing land use and public transport, impacting equity. In this paper, we use socio-economic statistics of census areas in conjunction with public transport travel data from a transport forecast model to assess the geographical and distributional fairness of alternative fare schemes: flat, zone-based and distance-based. We discuss our result in relation to both the scientific literature and the known “truths” in the public debate. The method is applied to the Case study of Stockholm public transport. We find that high-income travelers benefit from all three fare schemes considered but, in contrast to much of the literature, least by flat fares. A strong distance-dependent fare could be horizontally equitable but has poor vertical equity.

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A fair distribution of public transport benefits is a commonly stated goal of agencies and operators of public transport. However, it is less complicated and costly to provide accessibility in some parts of cities and their surroundings than in other parts. Densely populated areas, and areas situated closer to the city center therefore often have higher public transport accessibility than remote or sparsely populated areas. Neglecting these realities results with an unrealistic assessment of equity in service provision and hampers their consideration when setting policy goals. In this study, we propose a framework for investigating equity in the distribution of accessibility, where the suggested goal is to provide residents with equal accessibility for equally dense and central areas. For the Stockholm County, we show that accessibility may seem to be distributed horizontally inequitable and vertically regressive. However, once controlling for how dense and close to the city center residents live, while still being horizontally inequitable the distribution of accessibility in Stockholm County is found progressive, i.e., benefiting those with lower incomes. We demonstrate the proposed method for the case of skip-stop train operations and find that it shifts our constructed accessibility measure toward a more horizontally inequitable and vertically progressive state. We conclude that our proposed method can be a potent way for public transport agencies to measure and concretize equity goals and evaluate policy changes.

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We examine the effect of weather, accessibility and built-environment characteristics on overall travel experience as well as the experience with the latest trips. These are factors that are often disregarded in the travel satisfaction literature even though they are believed to largely influence the first mile of the door-to-door trip. This study fills a research gap in investigating all these factors by using, amongst other, a relatively large travel satisfaction survey from years 2009 to 2015 and by focusing on urban and peri-urban geographical contexts, the city and county of Stockholm (Sweden), respectively. The ordered logit model results show that county dwellers living close to a metro station and in well linked-to-all areas report higher overall travel satisfaction evaluations. In addition, precipitation and ground covered with snow have a negative influence on travel satisfaction. Our findings indicate that built-environment characteristics exert a rather weak influence on the travel experience, especially in the peri-urban context. However, some aspects such as living in areas with medium densities, low income and with high safety perceptions around public transport stations are associated with higher satisfaction levels. In turn, areas with single land uses are found to have lower travel satisfactions. These results are important for public transport planners and designers in devising measures to prevent and mitigate the negative outcome of some weather conditions and to conceive better designed transit oriented developments.@en

Classifying public transport service attributes based on their influence on overall traveler satisfaction can assist stakeholders and practitioners in introducing cost-efficient measures. To date most studies employed methods that were based on the assumption that the impact of service attributes on traveler satisfaction is entirely linear and symmetric. This study examines whether service attributes have a non-linear and asymmetric influence on the overall travel experience by employing the Three-factor theory (basic, performance and exciting factors). The analysis is conducted for different traveler segments depending on their level of captivity, travel frequency by public transport and travel mode used, and is based on a relatively large sample size collected for Stockholm County. Moreover, the estimated models control for important socio-demographic and travel characteristics that have been insofar overlooked. Results are presented in the form of a series of multi-level cubes that represent different essentiality of traveler needs which provide a useful methodological framework to further design quality service improvements that can be applied to various geographical contexts. Our findings highlight that a “one size fits all” approach is not adequate for identifying the needs of distinct traveler segments and of travelers using different travel modes. Furthermore, two-thirds of the attributes are consistently classified into the same factor category which entails important policy implications. This research deepens and expands the very limited knowledge of the application of the three-factor theory in the transport field.

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Ensuring safety during door-to-door public transport trips is a fundamental challenge to service providers, as safety influences individuals’ mobility. Using reported safety perceptions of travelers waiting at six bus stops with different characteristics in Stockholm, this study investigates factors that have an impact on determining travelers’ perceived safety and crime perceptions. This is done by assessing the importance of real-time information provision and the environmental characteristics of bus stops during the day and at night for different types of crime, after controlling for travelers’ individual and trip characteristics, and their previous experiences of victimization. Interaction effects of age, gender, and travel frequency are also tested. The results suggest that bus shelter characteristics, natural surveillance, and trustworthy real-time information are the most important factors influencing safety and crime perceptions. Additionally, safety perceptions are strongly influenced by previous experiences of victimization. The effect of perceived feelings about crime and safety are found to be nuanced by age and gender. Unlike some common beliefs, travelers: (1) feel less worried about becoming a victim of crime at bus stops associated with high crime rates; (2) prefer opaque shelters at night; and (3) have higher safety perceptions when the stop is located in an area of mixed land use. The impact of a bus stop’s number of passers-by is found to be insignificant. No direct or indirect effects can be attributed to frequency of travel by bus, indicating that familiar places and routine behavior have no effect on declared crime and safety perceptions.@en

Understanding how satisfaction with individual trip legs aggregates to the overall travel experience for different types of trips will enable the identification of the trip legs that are most impactful. For this purpose we analyze data on retrospective evaluations of entire multi-modal trip experiences and satisfaction with individual trip legs. We formulate and describe alternative aggregation rules and underpin them in theory and previous empirical findings. The results of a series of regression models show that for a large number of multi-modal trip configurations normative rules can better reproduce overall travel satisfaction than heuristic rules. This indicates that all trip legs need to be considered when evaluating the overall travel experience, especially for trips legs involving waiting and/or transferring time. In particular, weighting satisfaction with individual trip legs with perceived trip leg durations yielded the best predictor of overall travel satisfaction. No evidence for a disproportional effect of the last or most exceptional part of the trip was found. However, a larger dataset would be needed in order to replicate this work and potentially generalize the results. This research contributes to the literature on combining multi-episodic experiences and provides novel empirical evidence in the transport domain.

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Unfortunately several errors appeared in Table 2 in the original publication of this article. The corrected Table 2 is given in this erratum.@en

Ensuring safety during door-to-door public transport trips is a fundamental challenge to service providers, as safety influences individuals’ mobility. Using reported safety perceptions of travelers waiting at six bus stops with different characteristics in Stockholm, this study investigates factors that have an impact on determining travelers’ perceived safety and crime perceptions. This is done by assessing the importance of real-time information provision and the environmental characteristics of bus stops during the day and at night for different types of crime, after controlling for travelers’ individual and trip characteristics, and their previous experiences of victimization. Interaction effects of age, gender, and travel frequency are also tested. The results suggest that bus shelter characteristics, natural surveillance, and trustworthy real-time information are the most important factors influencing safety and crime perceptions. Additionally, safety perceptions are strongly influenced by previous experiences of victimization. The effect of perceived feelings about crime and safety are found to be nuanced by age and gender. Unlike some common beliefs, travelers: (1) feel less worried about becoming a victim of crime at bus stops associated with high crime rates; (2) prefer opaque shelters at night; and (3) have higher safety perceptions when the stop is located in an area of mixed land use. The impact of a bus stop’s number of passers-by is found to be insignificant. No direct or indirect effects can be attributed to frequency of travel by bus, indicating that familiar places and routine behavior have no effect on declared crime and safety perceptions.@en

Using National Travel Survey (NTS) data from the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, this paper examines how passenger transport emissions are divided across society and how similar this distribution is across these two countries. By looking across a series of data over time, the paper examines the relationships between socioeconomic characteristics and individual greenhouse gas emissions, the stability of these relationships over time, and the extent to which these relationships are similar in these two countries. Suitable policy measures for different socioeconomic groups are then examined. The general effectiveness and acceptability of these measures are then discussed by drawing on pan-European (Euro-barometer) survey results. Analyses of the NTS data reveal that about 10% of the Dutch population is responsible for almost half of all travel-related carbon dioxide (CO²) emissions in the Netherlands. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, about 20% of the population is responsible for 60% of the passenger-transportation-related CO² emissions. Analysis of pan-European opinion surveys shows that there is a clear awareness among the majority of the population that the type of car and the way in which it is used have important impacts on the environment. Despite this awareness, however, only a minority seem prepared to take action to reduce the environmental consequences of their travel behavior. The study supports the argument that the willingness to change behavior is a complex mixture of individual and social interests. A major challenge is how to encourage changes in behavior to reduce transport emissions with the right policies at the right time in the right place.

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