Incorporating enhanced service reliability of public transport in cost-benefit analyses

Incorporating enhanced service reliability of public transport in cost-benefit analyses

Van Oort, N.

Civil Engineering and Geosciences

Transport & Planning

2016-03-01

In this paper, we demonstrate how to calculate the passenger impacts of service unreliability. We show that passengers are affected by longer waiting times and the distribution of travel times. We present a framework to calculate these effects and to express them in monetary values. In the Netherlands and many other countries, service reliability is not explicitly incorporated in cost benefit analyses, although improved service reliability is often one of the main contributions of public transport projects. In an actual case, the replacement of a bus line by a tram line in Utrecht, in The Netherlands, we proved that our framework is valuable and can be applied into practice. By calculating the benefits of the improved service reliability of the proposed tram line, which were about 2/3 of all benefits, the cost benefit ratio was positive, which convinced the Dutch Minister of Infrastructure and Environment to support the project by €110 million.

cost benefit analysis
service reliability
tram line planning

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:72c64932-fe33-4e0c-ab97-825dcf90898d

Springer

1866-749X

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12469-016-0121-3

Case Study and Application, 2016

Institutional Repository

journal article

(c) 2016 The Author(s)
This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com