Best Practice Approaches to Public Transport Customer Amenity Valuation

Key aims

  • To review evidence on measured values with regard to public transport customer experience initiatives
  • To understand current practices in the use and adoption of these methods in Australia and internationally in public transport
  • To understand what can and cannot be measured in terms of customer experience initiatives
  • To explore methods used to measure amenity/soft factor values, their pros and cons and what is considered best practice.

Research components

  1. Research Literature Review: review of published evidence on values and methodologies
  2. World Transit Industry Practice Review: survey of public transport agencies in major world cities to assess current practices towards valuation and application of existing values
  3. International Practitioner Delphi Survey: survey of 20-30 experts worldwide to understand methods and best practices towards valuation of customer amenities.
Fig. 1 Classification of public transport customer amenities

Research context

  • The diverse set of factors affecting the quality of public transport are commonly classified into ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ factors.
  • Hard factors are physical measures that impact on journey times and reliability, but can also include fares and changes to service frequency and operating hours.
  • Soft factors, or customer amenities, cover a range of ancillary improvements which are not directly related to operations or service quantity but can enhance the quality of the customer experience. Examples are shown in Fig. 1.
  • Considerable research has been undertaken to understand the value that public transport passengers place on hard factors, yet research into public transport customer amenity valuations is far less common, with limited synthesis of the topic.
  • There is also a very limited understanding of current and best practices for valuing public transport customer amenities.

Research outputs

De Gruyter, C. & Currie, G. (2018) Best Practice Approaches to Public Transport Amenity/Soft Factor Valuation: World Transit Industry Practice Review, Public Transport Research Group, Monash University, Australia.

De Gruyter, C., Currie, G., Naznin, F. (2017) Best Practice Approaches to Public Transport Amenity/Soft Factor Valuation: Research Literature Review, Public Transport Research Group, Monash University, Australia.

De Gruyter, C., Currie, G., Naznin, F. (2017) Public Transport Customer Amenity Valuation Database, Public Transport Research Group, Monash University, Australia.