A methodology for calculating the passenger comfort benefits of railway travel

A comfortable environment in railway passenger coaches can be regarded as a resource for social consumption during the transport process. Railway passenger comfort benefits (RPCBs) can be regarded as a special generalized cost. In this paper, we select a series of objective and subjective indexes to formulate a quantitative method of calculating the RPCB with considering ticket fares. This method includes three steps: make the initial data dimensionless, calculate the weight of each index, and finally calculate the RPCBs. The proposed method was validated with the data collected from two types of trains: G13 from Beijing South to Shanghai Hongqiao and T109 from Beijing to Shanghai. Also, questionnaire survey was conducted in both trains. After data processing, the results show that there is a linear relationship between the RPCB and ticket fare with a correlation coefficient of 0.9616.

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