Effects of Ticket Inspection Levels: a Quasi-Experimental Approach

Abstract

When introducing electronic ticketing it can be economically sensitive for bus transport companies also to introduce an honour-based ticketing which makes fare evasion an issue. In a quasi-experimental setting effects of increasing ticket inspection levels, changing the clothing of the inspectors from official to civil clothing, and varying sizes of inspection teams on different reported reasons for passengers without a ticket are analysed by means of Poisson regression. As expected higher ticket inspection levels have a decreasing effect on the share of passengers who are reported to have ‘no (validated) / valid ticket’ as well as passengers who have their ‘ticket forgotten’. A change from official to civilian clothing of the inspectors reveals higher shares of passengers with ‘no (validated) / valid ticket’ but seems to have a decreasing effect on the share of the group ‘ticket forgotten’, and the size of the inspection team reveals small but significant higher shares of both groups. Furthermore, this quasi-experiment shows that when combined the measures mentioned above lead to a substantially lower share of the group ‘ticket forgotten’ but reveals a higher share of the other group. Knowledge of the differences of the effects on the reported reasons is relevant for revenue effects as well as for comparisons of fare evasion between different public transport systems.