Hiroyuki SAITO
Title: A Study on Measuring Option Value of Local City Railways
Supervisor: Shoji MATSUMOTO, Kazushi SANO and Satoshi TSUCHIYA
Recent suburbanization of urban district and rapid progress of motorization due to road improvement cause local railways decreasing passengers. As a result, there are partially or fully dead tracks in local lines.
Cost benefit analysis is a fundamental method to evaluate on public transport investment. In general, benefit is measured as value of direct use by consumer surplus. However, it tends to be underestimated due to luck of measuring nonmarket value such as option value and bequest value. In consequence, methodology has been developed that evaluates nonmarket value such as option value. There are two major approaches: contingent valuation method (CVM) and stated choice method (SCM).
CVM asks respondents directly willingness to pay in order to evaluating value. Mainly, this method has been developed in environmental economics through many prior researches, and it is also applied for local transport services in our country.
In SCM, respondents are asked to choose the best profile from the ones of various combinations of service levels. There is no previous case study of SCM in our country. Hence, employing SCM approach, we evaluate the consumer surplus and the option value for rail users, and the option value for non-users of Toyama Light Rail Transit and Toyama Local Railways -Fujikoshi and Kamitaki lines, in order to compare the result to existing ones of domestic and foreign case studies.
The result of estimation for the both target areas is 350~470 yen of consumer surplus, 890~1,118 yen of option value of rail users, and 1,359~1,411 yen of option value for non-users. Comparing our result with the prior ones in overseas and with the ones by CVM in domestics studies, we found that the option values are similar in each other.
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