Five empirical essays on the user perspective of the public transport ticketing system: understanding effects, attitudes, and behavioural response to ticketing improvements

Public transport (PT) plays a key sustainability role in society due to its significant economic, social and environmental benefits, stemming from the extent of its ridership. Fare policies, often implemented by means of a ticketing system, and service quality help service providers to manage PT ridership. Ticketing thus constitutes the interface between the user and the PT service and adds to the generalised cost of the PT service, thus impacting PT service quality. Yet, very little is known about users’ attitudes towards the PT ticketing system and their behavioural response to ticketing system improvements such as integrated ticketing, which is a current PT policy focus area globally due to highly deregulated PT markets, multimodalism, fast urbanisation and regionalisation of PT systems. The overall aim of this doctoral research, characterised by five related research papers, is therefore to contribute to the knowledge on commuters’ attitudes to the PT ticketing system and their behavioural response to integrated ticketing. Consequently, an inter-disciplinary psychological and economic approach to understanding behaviour was adopted. Using the Movingo multi-region and multi-operator integrated ticketing scheme in Sweden as a case, three questionnaire surveys were conducted along the corridor with the largest proportion of cross-county commuting in Sweden, Stockholm – Uppsala. Subsequently, exploratory statistical and discrete choice modelling methods were used to analyse the samples. The findings suggested that: a). PT commuters’ attitudes to ticketing was influenced by income, commuting route, ticket type and ticket purchase channel. They accepted fare payment more than fare inspection and they showed preference for automatic fare inspection, particularly seamless ticket inspection. b). integrated ticketing increased user satisfaction and made rail commuting attractive to car commuters but did not necessarily improve the overall perceived quality of ticketing due to interoperability challenges. c). users' valuation of integrated ticketing is at least 26% of the average season ticket price. Non-commuters’ valued it higher than commuters and males valued it higher than females. d). integrated ticketing has a positive effect on mode choice due to its synergistic effects. The study highlights some policy implications and recommends further research.