Effect of transport transfer quality on intercity passenger mode choice

Intercity transport is the forgotten step child of transportation behavioural research; so many important questions, such as how important are the various attributes of transfer quality in a traveller’s journey, are not often examined. Intermodal and multimodal passenger transport, unlike intermodal freight transport, carry the unique combination of a requirement to transfer between vehicles, in addition to cargo (passengers) with the ability to choose other modes based on a wide variety of factors including difficulty of transfer, availability of automatic baggage transfer and comfort. Our research aims to shed light on the relative importance and interrelations of these transfer attributes by analysing the limited range of European studies that value transfer quality attributes and compare and contrast them with each other. To support this, we collect our own study data which are used to evaluate questions that arose out of the analysis. The few studies that value European intercity transfers vary widely in their valuations, and so taking into context the countries, methodologies, samples, question framing and other metrics specific to each study, we establish links between the valuations and other data not explicitly discussed in those studies to the end of presenting a framework for understanding passenger valuation of intercity transfers. We also suggest some driving factors that may affect one or more of the transfer quality attributes that have not been discussed in the literature, such as perceived trip difficulty and traveller expectations.