Valuing Public Transport Customer Experience Infrastructure – a Review of Methods & Application

Abstract

One of the most significant contemporary trends in public transport systems internationally has been the refocussing of planning and operations on improving the customer experience. This has been matched by the work of transport economists who have been advancing the field of economic appraisals using willingness to pay methodologies to place a value on customer experience infrastructure so as to better represent customer valuation of these amenities in project evaluation. This paper provides an international review of this field by reporting on a major international research program on this topic. The first phase of the program assembled the results of over 500 valuations to assess the general range and values for a range of amenity infrastructure including Information, Environment, Access, Customer Facilities and Security amenities. Values were normalised between currencies of the countries where they were measured and adjusted to create present value estimates. The second phase of the program sought to understand authority practices in using customer experience infrastructure valuations in practice using a survey of 12 cities in Australia, Europe, North America and Asia. This established patterns of use by breadth of modes evaluated, types of methods used and the degree of sophistication which valuations were undertaken. The third and final phase of the research program involved an international expert Delphi survey of researchers and practitioners involved in measuring values of customer experience infrastructure. The main focus of the expert survey was problems and issues in measurement methods and best practices in approaches to measurement. The paper presents an overview of all the phases of the research program and provides a view on best practices for industry in providing methods and estimates for valuing customer amenities in public transport into the future.