Tomás Rossetti, Andrea Broaddus, Melissa Ruhl, Ricardo Daziano
Transportation system models rely heavily upon value of time (VOT) estimates to predict customer behavior. Accurate VOT estimates are particularly vital for planning new services such as on-demand ride hailing or microtransit because customers’ sensitivity to wait time, walk time, and route detour time affects their likelihood of selecting these modes. If an incorrect VOT is assumed during service planning, then ridership will be depressed because of a mismatch between their preferences and how the system is designed. In this paper, we report on the measurement of VOT for microtransit, a shared first-mile/last-mile mobility service, obtained using stated preference microdata from four U.S. cities. We found a median in-vehicle VOT for microtransit of $18.63 (95% CI: $13.39–$24.46) and an access VOT of $75.38 (95% CI: $59.22–$94.96). The former is practically equal to the VOT we found for respondents’ current modes ($20.24, 95% CI: $13.71–$26.94). We also found that men, younger riders, the highly educated, and transit riders are more likely to be interested in microtransit. Since the disutility of time spent on microtransit is not higher than that of other modes, we believe this new service has the potential to attract riders, and particularly if the system is designed with low waiting and walking times.
