Research into passengers' awareness of planned disruption

The aim of this study is to update ORR's understanding of passenger awareness of planned rail service disruption including how and when passengers become aware of possessions.

The consultants is to undertake market research to derive robust quantitative estimates regarding the timing and of level passenger awareness of planned disruption.

This research will be used to inform our policy on incentivising Network Rail to notify operators sufficiently early regarding planned service disruption.

Methodology

This is a difficult area requiring expert questionnaire design. A key difficulty is obtaining information regarding passengers that in the event of planned disruption would not travel by rail. We leave it open to applicants to propose their methodological approach, but it should be set out in some detail so that we can assess the robustness of the proposals.

For example, we think that combining the following two approaches has merit in helping estimate passenger awareness levels and timing:

• Under the first approach, passengers undertaking journeys subject to planned disruption would be interviewed. They would be asked about how and when they became aware of the disruption (and the implications of the disruption for their journey), including when they booked their journey.

• A complementary second approach would focus on interviewing people who had recently undertaken an undisrupted rail journey, for representative rail journeys. This could be either by surveying passengers on undisrupted trains or using an existing panel focusing on people that had recently undertaken an undisrupted train journey. They would be asked general questions about how they plan and book their rail journeys (e.g. via an internet search). The analysis of when and how passengers purchase tickets could also be enhanced with a separate analysis of timing associated with ticket sales data. Potentially, this survey could contain questions related to passengers' recent experience of disrupted train services. These questions could, for example, ask about passengers' behavioural responses to that disruption. Stated preference surveys might also be used.

The findings from the market research would feed into the analysis to estimate passenger awareness levels about forthcoming possessions.