The Values of Waiting Time, Travel Time, and a Seat on a Bus

Travel-time savings tend to be the dominant benefit of transportation improvements in developed countries. We can infer the values travelers attach to travel time from their choices among services that differ in time and money costs. This study applies maximum-likelihood estimation techniques to ridership survey data from routes on which a schedule of alternating high- and low-fare buses offers passengers an unusually wide range of prices for saving time. The methods we use provide estimates of the population distribution of waiting-time values rather than merely one, or a few, representative values.