Our Business Director, Alison, explores how important the ‘value of time’ is in public transport…
If you’ve ever tried to write a Business Case about smart ticketing, you very quickly get wrapped up in how many seconds each customer saves – passing through a rail gate more quickly, not holding up the bus to find change, not waiting at a vending machine.
But the comfort and convenience of selecting a ticket at your leisure and feeling safe in the knowledge that your ticket is sitting happily on your phone ready for when you need it; or even better, tapping in and out knowing that being charged a best value ticket is the default – it’s very hard to get anyone to agree this is worth monetising.
I’ve been pondering this blog for a while but as soon as I put proverbial pen to paper, up popped transport guru Phil Goodwin with an article about the way transport appraisal deals with time.
Emerging policy issues require us to rethink the role of ‘Value of Time’ in Transport Appraisal
He argues that economic appraisal has been based on the idea that time is money so anything that speeds up travel is ‘good for the economy’. He notes, however, that decisions people make about their travel depend both on how time-rich and money-rich they are, but transport appraisals are much more one-dimensional about this and hence over- or under-estimate the actual benefits of any interventions.
Now I’m not going to try and compete blog-wise with a fully-fledged guru, but I want to pick up on one aspect. Time spent traveling can only be considered a disbenefit if it is also useless; and people’s views of useful and useless time are dependent on lots of things.
I am writing this blog whilst waiting for a friend. Without table, chair, Wi-Fi, pen and electronic notebook, glass of wine, I would just be waiting impatiently and unproductively.
Equally when I travel from Leeds to London by train, I have reasonable Wi-Fi, tea and coffee, comfy seats, and a table if I’m lucky, so the train is my office for two hours. When I travel from Leeds to Birmingham, the wifi struggles to beat my 1999 dial-up speed, the overcrowding means the drinks trolley can’t get through and I’m rammed into a tiny window seat with a man’s elbow invading my personal space. Making either journey 12 minutes faster (the cornerstone of much transport appraisal) will not significantly affect the former and will only marginally improve the latter. These experiences definitely impact my propensity to travel to either destination.
We have to have an economic model that makes sense of the different ways people interact with and experience their travel, so that our estimated benefits are delivered in real life.
Rail and to a lesser extent bus allow people to do more interesting and useful things than driving a car can allow. And in case I stray too much into a business perspective, what value should we place on passenger assistance? Quiet coaches? Wheelchair spaces on buses? Seat reservations? These all impact people’s travel choices, enable them to take a fuller part in society and as such have economic value.
It is only by measuring these factors and giving them their rightful socio-economic value, that we can start building in these critical ‘softer’ measures – comfort, accessibility, connectivity – from the start.