The value of waiting spaces: Tourists’ willingness to pay for high-quality bus terminals

Transport quality has long been recognized as an important factor in influencing travelers’ behavior, and transport terminal quality undoubtedly plays no small part. Indeed, transit promotion policies explicitly based on qualitative factors and high-standard architecture are increasingly being adopted in designing new bus terminals and stops. High architectural standards can be found in several bus terminals worldwide. Nevertheless, the literature in transport sector has yet to explore the impact of bus terminal “hedonic quality” on users’ behavior or use their willingness to pay (WTP) in cost–benefit analyses or other transport policy applications. Hedonic value is here intended as the aggregate of all elements related to travelers’ pleasure in spending time in a terminal where architectural beauty and the passenger services offered are arguably the most visible and representative attributes. Within this context, we propose a quantitative analysis of the perceived hedonic value of bus nodes in terms of users’ WTP (pure preference) for a high-quality bus terminal. To this end a discrete choice experiment based on a visual immersive experience was performed, and data were collected from 324 residents of Milan (Italy) traveling for tourism. Different binomial Mixed Logit models with panel data and random coefficients were estimated for the purpose. Monetary valuation of pure preference for using a high-quality bus terminal was estimated with a mean of about 25 % of the average trip cost observed for the case study considered. This pure preference means that the Italian tourist is willing to spend up to €4.35/trip more for a high-quality bus waiting space or travel up to 28.2 min/trip more, instead of using a traditional bus terminal for the same trip. Category-specific analyses show that females > 30 years old have a greater pure preference for a high-quality bus terminal (up to + 220 %) against males and young users. The employed also have a higher (+42 %) pure preference for the beauty of a bus terminal against others. The results of this paper should be compared with those from other case studies as they have a potential impact for transportation planning applications, underling the importance of also incorporating “hedonic quality” as explicit design variables for new/revamped transportation hub. At the same time, new challenges are posed for modeling user behavior and determining quality-related indicators and measures.