Abstract
The economic valuation for different accessibility levels is still an unexplored topic in the field of urban and transport planning. This paper is an exploratory study that aims to quantitatively assess the added value of having multiple options of the same destination available to travel to. A two-phase methodology is proposed based on two different questionnaires. The first phase consists of an explorative questionnaire that helped to narrow the research to two final destinations: medical centres and kindergartens. The second phase is based on the contingent valuation method payment cards, obtaining willingness to pay (WTP) values for different hypothetical situations. A first conclusion is that the value of having multiple options available varies between types of destinations. For basic services this value is motivated by non-use and option values, for non-basic services use values dominate. Secondly, in the case of kindergartens, users and option users have higher a WPT than non-users. For medical centres there is no statistically significant difference between these groups. Third, we did not find a statistical significant impact of demographic variables on WPT values. Fourth, sometimes, it is not only the number of options itself what people appreciate. Many other factors relevant for this appreciation also play a role, examples being the capacity of current destinations or particular characteristics of the destination being valued, especially in the case of non-public destinations.
Highlights
In many countries improving accessibility has been one of the main objectives for policymakers in the field of transport and urban planning
Stated Preference (SP) techniques are very flexible and, since they do not rely on existing markets and are based on hypothetical situations, they can be applied to almost all non-market goods or ser vices, to both past and future changes, and can even capture all types of benefits, including non-use values (OECD, 2018)
Stated Preference techniques can be subdivided into two groups: Contingent Valuation Methods (CVM) and Choice Experiments (CE), called choice based Conjoint Analysis
Summary
In many countries improving accessibility has been one of the main objectives for policymakers in the field of transport and urban planning. Despite the numerous papers published on accessibility in recent years (see Shi et al, 2020, for a review) we still poorly understand the (economic) value of accessibility levels, especially the added value of having multiple options to travel to (van Wee, 2016). This paper is an exploratory study that aims to find out for which type of destinations it is (not) important for people to have multiple options available and why, to quantitatively assess the added value of having multiple options of the same destination available to travel to, and to explore factors that influence this added value. We aim to explicitly distinguish between uses, option users and nonusers (see section 2) Such information is helpful to assess the pros and cons of policies that change accessibility levels, in this case policies for changes in the number of destinations within reach, for given destination types
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