Electronic Ticketing in Public Transport: A Field Study in a Rural Area

The NoordNed Mobile Ticketing service (in this article referred to as M-Ticketing) is an early example of electronic ticketing in the Netherlands. Using this service, customers no longer need to buy a ticket at a ticket office or ticket machine. Instead, people can order M-Tickets through the Internet or by calling a voice response system and receive their M-ticket on their mobile phone through the Short Message Service (SMS). This article describes the innovative aspects and customer expectations of the service offered. Consumer adoption of the service was evaluated by conducting a field study. It appears that the service is most attractive for semifrequent public transport users. The participants were also asked for their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for additional mobile services. This WTP level turned out to be rather low so we must conclude that it would be difficult to develop additional services as a profit center in order to make the ticketing commercially feasible. The most interesting additional service was en-route real-time travel information. A regression analysis of WTP for this service revealed that it depends positively on features of travel behavior such as the number of transfers per trip.