Measuring Retiming Responses of Passengers to a Prepeak Discount Fare by Tracing Smart Card Data: A Practical Experiment in the Beijing Subway

Understanding passengers’ responses to fare changes is the basis to design reasonable price policies. This work aims to explore retiming responses of travelers changing departure times due to a prepeak discount pricing strategy in the Beijing subway in China, using smart card records from an automatic fare collection (AFC) system. First, a new set of classification indicators is established to segment passengers through a two-step clustering approach. Then, the potentially influenced passengers for the fare policy are identified, and the shifted passengers who changed their departure time are detected by tracing changes in passengers’ expected departure times before and after the policy. Lastly, the fare elasticity of departure time is defined to measure the retiming responses of passengers. Two scenarios are studied of one month (short term) and six months (middle term) after the policy. The retiming elasticity of different passenger groups, retiming elasticity over time, and retiming elasticity functions of shifted time are measured. The results show that there are considerable differences in the retiming elasticities of different passenger groups; low-frequency passengers are more sensitive to discount fares than high-frequency passengers. The retiming elasticity decreases greatly with increasing shifted time, and 30 minutes is almost the maximum acceptable shifted time for passengers. Moreover, the retiming elasticity of passengers in the middle term is approximately twice that in the short term. Applications of fare optimization are also executed, and the results suggest that optimizing the valid time window of the discount fares is a feasible way to improve the congestion relief effect of the policy, while policy makers should be cautious to change fare structures and increase discounts.