The demand for public transport: The effects of fares, quality of service, income and car ownership

Abstract

This paper reports on key findings from a collaborative study whose objective was to produce an up-to-date guidance manual on the factors affecting the demand for public transport for use by public transport operators and planning authorities, and for academics and other researchers. Whilst a wide range of factors was examined in the study, the paper concentrates on the findings regarding the influence of fares, quality of service and income and car ownership. The results are a distillation and synthesis of identified published and unpublished information on the factors affecting public transport demand. The context is principally that of urban surface transport in Great Britain, but extensive use was made in the study of international sources and examples.

Introduction

This paper reports on the key findings of a collaborative study undertaken by the Universities of Leeds, Oxford and Westminster, University College London and TRL Limited (Balcombe et al., 2004). The objective of the study was to produce an up-to-date guidance manual for use by public transport operators and planning authorities, and for academics and other researchers. The context of the study was principally that of urban surface transport in Great Britain, but extensive use was made of international sources and examples.

While a wide range of factors was examined in the study, the findings relating to fares, quality of service and car ownership are the most significant and this paper concentrates on these. However, as Balcombe et al. (2004) make clear, in practice the factors cannot be treated either in isolation from each other or in isolation from many other direct and indirect influences on public transport demand. The main study also considered new transport modes such as guided busways, the relationship between land use and public transport supply and demand, and the impacts of transport policies generally on public transport. It also looked at the influence of developments in transport and technology over the past two decades, such as innovations in pricing, changes in vehicle size, environmental controls on emissions, and developments in ticketing and information provision facilitated by advances in computing.

In 1980, the then Transport and Road Research Laboratory, now the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL), published a collaborative report: the Demand for Public Transport (Webster and Bly, 1980). This report, which became widely known as ‘The Black Book’, identified many factors which influence demand and where possible, given the limitations of the data that were available for analysis, quantified their effects. The Black Book subsequently proved to be of great value to public transport operators and transport planners and policy makers. However, in the following 20 years there has been a great deal of change in the organisation of the passenger transport industry, the legislative framework under which it operates, in technology, in the incomes, life-styles and aspirations of the travelling public, in car ownership levels, and in the attitudes of policy makers. While these changes have not invalidated the general conclusions of the Black Book, they will have reduced the relevance to modern conditions of much of the quantitative analysis. The new collaborative study, of which the results in this paper are a part, was therefore set up to take account of another 20 years' worth of public transport information, and more recent advances in transport research techniques. The overall objectives of the study were therefore to:

• Undertake analysis and research by using primary and secondary data sources on the factors influencing the demand for public transport.

• Produce quantitative indications of how these factors influence the demand for public transport.

• Provide accessible information on such factors for key stakeholders such as public transport operators and central and local government.

• Produce a document that assists in identifying cost-effective schemes for improving services.

The results presented in this paper are a distillation and synthesis of identified published and unpublished evidence on the influencing factors drawn from three key areas:

• Fundamental principles relating to transport demand.

• Evidence from research carried out since publication of the 1980 report.

• Empirical results for a range of modes.

Where possible, this paper looks at changes in response parameters since the 1980 study.

The data for the study mainly came from existing studies and literature identified through searches for relevant literature in publication databases, material supplied by public transport operators and local authorities and contacts with researchers engaged in analysis in the field. The information was collected, assessed for relevance and, as far as was possible, quality, and an analysis and synthesis made of implications of the overall body of evidence; a meta-analysis of fares elasticities was also conducted. In assessing the evidence it was recognised that fares elasticities, for instance, can be derived in a number of ways, for example: time trends, stated and revealed preference surveys, before-and-after studies, time series analysis, cross sectional analysis, and logit modelling. All of these approaches have their advantages and disadvantages, depending on the context in which the original research was conducted. The various methodological approaches were noted during the information gathering exercise to ensure that the outcomes did not contain unwanted bias.

Most findings reviewed relate to the urban and regional market, with some references to rural areas. The inter-city, long-distance market as such is not covered, and hence ‘long’ distances refer to about 30 km, as in the original study of 1980.