Car Users’ Trade-Offs Between Time, Trip Length, Cost and Road Pricing in Behavioural Models

Otto Anker Nielsen and Goran Vuk
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Otto Anker Nielsen: Technical University of Denmark
Goran Vuk: Danish Transport Research Institute

Chapter 18 in Road Pricing, the Economy and the Environment, 2008, pp 351-374 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Stated Preference (SP) experiments are the obvious choice in order to forecast travellers’ responses to alternatives that do not exist today. SP experiments can in addition change the variables in a controlled factorial design, whilst Revealed Preference surveys (RP) have to rely on measured observations. Preferences concerning correlated explanatory variables such as travel time and travel length can therefore often be estimated more easily by SP experiments than by RP surveys. However, respondents may not act as they claim in the interview and the design may affect the results. The chapter illustrates, based on an SP experiment compared with the AKTA data (Chapter 6), how the definition of variables can influence the results obtained. Value of travel time, VoT, (both free flow and congestion travel time), choice of time-of-day of travel and route choice are considered both without and with road pricing. It is shown that the design of the experiment seriously affects the result especially with respect to VoT. It is then shown how the income variable and distributed coefficients (taste variation) can improve the model fit and its behavioural accuracy. The model structure obtained corresponded well to the best models from the field experiment (RP) in AKTA, although the size of coefficients differed somewhat. It appears that (marginal) cost is a problematic variable compared to trip distance as the respondents had serious difficulties in estimating the cost per kilometre. Road pricing was considered a bit worse than a pure marginal driving cost in the road pricing situation, i.e. car users preferred paying for fuel than paying road pricing. But the total cost after road pricing was introduced was weighted less than before road pricing compared to travel time — or in other words travelling time was weighted higher. This can be explained by the fact that travellers have restrictions and inertia in their possibilities of changing behaviour as well as the fact that the car-users who still use the car are the ones with the higher willingness to pay and the travellers who change behaviour have the lower willingness to pay.

Keywords: State Preference; Route Choice; Mixed Logit; Cost Coefficient; Road Price (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-77150-0_18

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