Valuing public transport customer experience infrastructure: an international expert Delphi study of methods & application

A worldwide trend in public transport has been a shift to enhance customer experience for users aboard public transport in addition to provide the fundamentals of planning and operations. This effort relies on the work of transport economists who develop ‘willingness to pay’ methodologies that quantify the qualitative experiences of customers and provide value for various amenities. Although a considerable amount of research effort has been put towards determining the value that public transport users place on different amenity types, there is little understanding of current practice of amenity valuation as a whole. This paper presents results from a Delphi survey of international expert researchers and practitioners involved in customer amenity valuation, with the aim of determining what experts see as problems and issues in measurement, and best practices in approach to measurement. The major findings show that experts prefer stated preference methods due to the flexibility and range of variables possible, but stress the use of mixed methods approaches in best practice (e.g., a mixed stated and revealed preference method). In addition to good survey design, 78% of experts believed that Post Implementation Reviews should be conducted to check accuracy of amenity values, but reported on average that only 3.6% of values are check with Post Implementation Reviews.