Measuring the Benefits of Intercity Passenger Rail: A Study

Ineligible Passengers
Several groups of passengers were not eligible to participate in the research study.
Passengers under age 18 (minors) were not surveyed as parental consent would have been
necessary for their participation. Some past studies had included passengers as young as 16 in
their surveys (likely wanting to obtain a response from all of the train riders who might have
access to an automobile), but the requirement for parental consent made including these
passengers impractical for this study. Passengers traveling as part of an organized group were
also not included in the final study. Researchers obtained some surveys of passengers from
groups in April, but researchers decided to not include these data in the final analysis. The
decision to exclude data from groups was, in large part, due to the fact that these passengers did
not choose to ride the train so much as they chose to participate with a group travel event that
happened to include the train. On April 25, a group of passengers on two of the runs that were
participants in and support staff of a contest sponsored by ODOT as part of the celebration of the
Heartland Flyer’s tenth anniversary in service were also not eligible. Finally, researchers who
were distributing and collecting surveys (one in April, two in July) were included in the
passenger count but were obviously ineligible for the study.
Influences on Survey Non-Participation
The participation rate of this study in both survey periods was 76 percent, meaning that
76 percent of those passengers eligible to participate in the study returned a valid survey form to
the researchers. The causes of non-participation were not formally tabulated, but a majority of
the non-participants consisted of those passengers that simply declined to participate in the study.
One possible reason why passengers did not want to participate in the study was because they
had already taken the survey once and did not want to bother taking it again. This occurred
frequently on the northbound run (#822) with passengers who were making day trips, having
filled out the survey that morning. In April, the participation rate for train #822 was nearly
20 percentage points lower than #821. However, in July, passengers on train #822 participated
in the study at a slightly higher percentage than #821. Other causes of non-participation include
passengers that were sleeping, talking on a cell phone, or language barriers. Table 4-3 shows the
participation rate from this study compared with similar rates for other past studies. In general,
response rates for intercity passenger rail on-board surveys are high, likely due to the fact that
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