Valuing Urban Bus Attributes: An Experience in Kolkata

Abstract

The article presents the marginal willingness-to-pay (WTP) estimates for various qualitative and quantitative attributes of travel with reference to the bus transportation system in Kolkata City, India. A stated choice experiment is designed to capture the responses for estimating marginal WTP values for various attributes. WTP values are estimated separately for commuting and noncommuting trips. The effects of model specification and socioeconomic parameters on WTP values are also studied. Estimates from standard multinomial logit (MNL) and different random parameter logit (RPL) models indicate that WTP values vary with model specification. In the process of developing RPL models, successful application of sparsely used constrained triangular distribution is also demonstrated.