The hedonic value of railways terminals. A quantitative analysis of the impact of stations quality on travellers behaviour

Transit services quality has long been recognized as an important factor in influencing travelers behaviour and terminals quality is certainly part of it. As a matter of fact a number of transit promotion policies explicitly based on qualitative factors and specifically high architectural standards are being adopted in designing new railways stations and several examples of remarkable architecture applied to railways stations can be found all round the world. In spite of this, the literature in transportation modelling has not yet analyzed the impact of the hedonic quality on travelers’ behaviour quantifying whether and by how much it increases their propensity to use rail services. A binomial logit model, simulating the choice between a traditional rail line and a new line open in 2009 in the northern area of Naples – Italy (high architectural and aesthetic standards railways) was specified and estimated for trips having both routing options between the same origin–destination pair. The model was specified with serial correlation in residuals and estimated using RP–SP data for different users’ segments. The main difference between the two alternatives in the real scenario was the stations architectural quality as all other attributes, including travel time, frequency, access and egress times, trains and riding comfort, security, were basically the same. In Stated Preference experiments several scenarios were presented to users with four levels of level of service attributes and factorial fractional design. The results show a significant impact of stations architectural quality on users’ choices and allow to estimate reciprocal substitution coefficients with respect to other level of service attributes. The average monetary ‘‘value of stations quality’’ was quantified in 35 Euro cents/trip for students and in 50 Euro cents/trip for commuters (+43%). Alternative-specific waiting time coefficients showed a context effect for both students and commuters (respectively 31% and 35% lower values for traditional stations) but they did not explain entirely the preference for high architectural railways line. It also resulted that female travelers showed a significant preference for stations quality (+33% with respect to male). Other results related to access and egress time suggest that, if everything else being equal, the high architectural line have a larger ‘‘catchment area’’ with respect to a traditional rail of approximately 400 meters by walking. The results of this research should be compared with those from other contexts as they have a potential impact for railways planning showing that architectural quality of stations should be considered as an explicit design variable and could be compared with other, possibly more expensive, improvements (e.g. frequency increases, accessibility improvements) and poses new challenges for modelling user behaviour and quality-related measures.