Seamless ticket inspection: Proposing and exploring users’ reaction to a next generation public transport ticket inspection solution

Abstract

Ticket payment and inspection are the two main dimensions of public transport ticketing for users. Both research and technological advances have focused mainly on improving the former. In contrast, this paper explores users’ preferences for ticket inspection options and the associated factors that influence their likelihood of accepting seamless ticket inspection. This is motivated by the general lack of research on users’ preferences and satisfaction for ticket inspection alternatives, and the need to use established and emerging smart card and mobile ticketing technologies to develop smarter, seamless and more convenient ticket inspection solutions. The dataset is part of the data that was collected along the Stockholm – Uppsala corridor for the purpose of evaluating the Movingo integrated ticketing scheme. The number of respondents in 2017 was 450 and 165 in 2018. McNemar's test was conducted to test for difference in the respondents’ choice proportions between ticket inspection by turnstiles and staff in the two samples. By extending the choice set to include the hypothetical option of seamless ticket inspection in the second survey, a one-way chi-squared goodness of fit test was conducted to determine if the respondents still showed preference for ticket inspection alternatives. Since it was only the second dataset that contained all the four ticket inspection alternatives, this cross-sectional dataset was used to estimate one multinomial and two nested logit models to analyse users’ choice among the ticket inspection alternatives. The findings suggest that given only turnstiles and staff as the only ticket inspection alternatives, the respondents’ choice of ticket inspection by turnstiles over that by staff did not change over time. However, given five alternatives, majority of the respondents opted for seamless ticket inspection and major user groups such as females and young people have a high tendency to accept it. Further research is recommended on particular aspects of the envisaged seamless ticket inspection.