Measuring the Benefits of Intercity Passenger Rail: A Study

One question on the survey asked the respondent how many trips he or she had made on
the Heartland Flyer in the past 12 months, including the one they were on at the time of the
survey. Some respondents (25 in April, 39 in July) did not provide a response to this question
but a substantial number (10 in April, 23 in July) of these did indicate somewhere on the form
that the trip was their first on the Heartland Flyer (i.e., no previous trips in 12 months). This
was an obvious misunderstanding of the question on the part of the respondent as the minimum
answer would be one trip if answered properly. Respondents that indicated the current trip was
their first trip were recoded into the first choice “1 to 4 Trips,” the proper response to the
question as designed.
From the review of past studies, there was some indication that a number of surveys
would be returned with the same response marked for boarding station and alighting station.
This issue stems from the survey form requesting that the passenger provide responses about the
current one-way trip segment, but passengers instead responding about the entire trip tour. In the
case of this study, for example, a passenger making a one-day round-trip from Norman to
Gainesville might indicate “Norman” as both the boarding and alighting station, which would be
incorrect based on how the survey form was designed. General concerns in the study design for
on-board surveys regarding this issue in the urban transit context are noted in the literature (51).
This was an issue for 12 surveys in April and 28 surveys in July. Researchers utilized two
sources of information to resolve this issue: the conductor origin-destination matrix and adjacent
survey data. Also, researchers assumed that the station reported on the survey form was valid for
at least one of the trip ends. The conductor’s passenger origin-destination matrix showed a total
count of all passengers traveling between each station pair. Continuing the example from above,
if the matrix indicated that all the passengers boarding in Gainesville on train #822 were
traveling to Norman, researchers assumed that the boarding station for the erroneous survey
record was Gainesville and was recoded accordingly. The passenger loading procedures used by
the Amtrak on-board staff (described in Chapter 3) resulted in passengers boarding at a particular
station being seated in close proximity. Since the survey forms were individually numbered,
there was a high probability that sequentially numbered survey forms were distributed to
passengers boarding at the same station. Consequently, boarding station information from
survey records adjacent to the erroneous record was also utilized by researchers to rectify these
issues. A great majority of survey records with this particular issue were from train #822, the
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