Kathleen M. Painter

Using Contingent Valuation to Measure User and Nonuser Benefits: An Application to Public Transit

The contingent valuation method (CVM) was used to measure the value of a community service, rural transit, that has both user and nonuser values. Traditional focus groups and a CVM questionnaire provide estimates of willingness to pay and willingness to accept. Tobit analysis was used to test relationships among the variables. Income was not related to the amount of perceived benefit, but the alternative desire to provide transit for others was statistically significant. Ranges for possible total benefits, user and nonuser, are provided for the test transit systems. Proper aggregation of benefits to the population was found to be critical.

Environmental and Economic Impacts of Agricultural Policy Reform: An Interregional Comparison

Mathematical programming results revealed that moving toward more flexible agricultural policies would generate substantial economic and environmental gains in a North Carolina diversified cropping region. But in a Washington-Idaho dryland grains region, only the use of relatively new and sometimes problematic alternative cropping systems permitted environmental and economic gains under policy reform. In both regions, a recoupling policy, which links government payments to resource-conserving farming practices, was needed to protect environmental quality when market prices for program crops were high.

Demand Forecasting for Rural Transit: Models Applied to Washington State

Rural transit demand forecasting is a tool that aids planners and analysts in the allocation of scarce resources for typically underserved populations. As the number of privately owned automobiles has increased over the past several decades, the provision of public transportation has decreased and lessened the ability of nondrivers to participate in the workforce, take advantage of social service programs, and receive adequate medical care. With Washington State as the case study, three models were developed on the basis of usage characteristics for several existing transportation systems in four Washington counties. Peer analysis was used to create three models with varying levels of complexity and data requirements to predict ridership on countywide public transportation systems. Results indicate that the disaggregated transit demand (DTD) model estimation techniques are the most refined and flexible. The DTD model provides a significant starting point for developing accurate equations for predicting transit need and demand for underserved areas in Washington State.