Reduction in the burden of waiting for public transit due to real-time schedule information: a conjoint analysis study

Abstract

This paper reports a conjoint analysis study that tested the hypothesis that the burden of waiting for transit will decrease as traveler certainty with respect to wait duration increases, i.e., with provision of real-time transit schedule information. Conjoint analysis has been used extensively as a means to evaluate individual preference or utility. The target audience for the conjoint study, which was carried out through the US mail in the Spring of 1994, consisted of 1000 randomly sampled employees on the University of Michigan Medical Campus. The conjoint data and the model developed through the study show that real-time transit schedule information is of potentially significant value to transit customers in that the burden of a given wait decreases as the degree of certainty about the duration of the wait increases. This result should further motivate transit system designers to redouble efforts to provide real-time transit schedule information. This is especially true since such information could also reduce the duration of the wait. Moreover, the conjoint model developed acts as an inferential tool for further investigating the relationship between information, reliability, and travel time and should be of significant value in transit system design.