Wardman, M and Toner, J orcid.org/0000-0002-6679-3889 (2020) Is generalised cost justified in travel demand analysis? Transportation, 47 (1). pp. 75-108. ISSN 0049-4488
Abstract
Generalised cost (GC) has long been widely used as a measure of the attractiveness of travel alternatives. We argue that its limitations have been forgotten, overlooked or not appreciated, and it is used because ‘it has always been used’. We explore the relationships between GC and its components (price, time, value of time) and their respective demand elasticities and show that the variation of component elasticities over time and space is not consistent with the variation implied by a GC formulation. We therefore conduct detailed tests of whether the GC approach is justified. The datasets used are recorded ticket sales between pairs of railway stations for a number of years and covering a variety of types of flow. When restricted to a GC formulation, we find that allowing VoT to be estimated as part of the modelling process is greatly superior to using either the UK official VoTs or using VoTs from meta-analyses. We conclude that the importance of using the correct VoT in calculating GC cannot be overstated. Failure to do so will lead to incorrect derivation of component elasticities from the GC elasticity. A more flexible approach estimating elasticities to components of GC is better than even the best GC formulation. We conclude that robust models, with large sample sizes and very precise coefficient estimates in their standard form, are not able to support the variation in GJT and fare elasticities that would be implied by the GC approach. It might be time to stop using GC.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2018, The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
Keywords: | Generalised cost; Travel demand modelling; Elasticity; Value of time |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > Institute for Transport Studies (Leeds) > ITS: Economics and Discrete Choice (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 28 Jan 2019 12:22 |
Last Modified: | 21 Feb 2020 14:52 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s11116-017-9850-7 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:141645 |
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