In this thesis, the functioning of passenger delay-based refund schemes in urban public transportation settings is evaluated, such as metros or light-rails. These are used when a passenger encounters a delay on their trip, in order to grant a form of refund to them. To the best of knowledge, no research has been carried out yet on several aspects of these refund schemes, such as which design considerations can be taken into account upon establishing one, or how their performance can be evaluated. To clarify these issues, the state of the practice is reviewed by surveying the internet and the information that is being provided by the individual public transport operators. By categorising this information, it can be established what the design aspects of these refund schemes are. These are the delay type such as departure or arrival delay, the delay threshold, i.e., the minimum delay from which a trip taken is elegible for a refund, the refund type, which is the form of refund that the passenger receives, and the possibility for alternative transport to be refunded. In order to determine whether there could be a form of linearity between delays and refunds, and to facilitate the evaluation of different refund schemes, a regression analysis was carried out on approximately a year of passenger trip data and vehicle data from the Washington Metro. This enabled acquiring more reliable, i.e., excluding individual passenger’s possibly erroneous behaviour, observations of the departure delay and arrival delay of every trip taken during this study period. Using this data, a possible link between the total amounts of delays encountered and refunds granted per day was analysed. It could be concluded that there is indeed a strong linear effect between these two. Furthermore, a number of key performance indicators (KPI’s) was established which allowed to assess the performance of a set of synthetic refund schemes, in which the parameters were varied that resulted from the aforementioned survey. Furthermore, a refund scheme was recreated that uses the general punctuality on a line and subsequently refunds all travelers that can have been expected to be effected by a possible drop in this punctuality. Using these KPI’s, conclusions could be drawn on the performance of different refund schemes, in the sense of how many refunds per trip are granted, how the ratio of the average delay of all refunded trips vs. the average delay of all trips is, how many revenue losses the refund schemes yield for the operator, and how much of the time losses (using a certain Value of Time) are compensated for.

In this thesis, the significance of the so-called ‘induced demand’ phenomenon is discussed. This phenomenon can occur when a stretch of road which is prone to congestion is widened. Although this widening should in theory solve congestion problems, it can often spawn additional effects, typically undesired and occasionally unforeseen. These effects could include shifts of travel in route and time (people formerly avoiding congested roads by departing at another time or taking a detour will now return to that road), but also new travels might be made which were not made before road widenings. All of these effects might eventually converge to raise traffic amounts to levels with which the widened road is just as prone to congestion as it was. This additional traffic demand which a widened or new road creates is commonly denoted as ‘induced demand’.
Although this induced demand phenomenon has commonly been acknowledged to exist, it seemed like there was little agreement on both its amount as well as its significance. Some readings seemed to suggest that for every percent of road capacity added, a percent of new traffic will occur, whereas other readings suggested that the effects were much smaller and might be limited to, e.g., merely a third of a percent extra traffic for a percent extra road capacity. A semi-systematic literature review has been carried out, enabling to compare writings of various origins, ranging from scientific papers via documents from governmental advisory bodies to newspaper articles for the general public.
These writings help to determine the significance of induced demand. It has been found that there are major discrepancies, even amongst scientific literature, concerning the ways in which the induced demand is measured, both in terms of the actual quantities which are compared to each other, as well as the time span over which the aforementioned effects are measured. These discrepancies do not aid in creating an unambiguous message for policymakers, nor do they facilitate a straightforward approach in avoiding new congestion on widened roads. Combined with the remark to be found in many scientific writings that the induced demand topic is in need of more research, a relayed recommendation from this thesis is therefore that more research be performed into this topic. However, the main recommendation is that the newly done research be more standardised, both in terms of the measured quantities and the time span over which the effects are measured.