Seamless public transport ticket inspection: Exploring users’ reaction to next-generation ticket inspection

Abstract

Ticket payment and inspection are the two main dimensions of public transport (PT) ticketing for users. Both research and technological advances have focused mainly on improving the former. In contrast, this study explored users' preferences for ticket inspection options and identified some factors that influenced their likelihood of accepting “seamless ticket inspection”. The dataset is part of a two-wave survey that was collected along the Stockholm – Uppsala corridor to evaluate the Movingo integrated ticketing scheme, a smartcard and mobile phone-based multiple-county commuting ticket that applies to both intercity and intracity bus and train services across the six Mälardalen regions of Sweden. McNemar's test, one-way chi-squared goodness of fit test, multinomial and nested logit models were used to analyse the samples. The findings suggest that given five ticket inspection options, many of the respondents chose “seamless ticket inspection”. Major PT user groups such as females and young people are more likely to accept “seamless ticket inspection”. Further research is recommended on particular aspects of the envisaged “seamless ticket inspection”.