Using the Swing Weighting technique enabled us to capture to what extent survey participants value improvements on various bus service attributes

Importance weights make only sense if they can be associated with an improvement from a low to a high level. To make participants’ responses comparable, we showed everybody the same verbal and visual levels of improvements.

• For each other attribute, say how much benefit its improvement would bring relative to the most valued improvement.

Here: Reducing the door-to-door journey time from 45 till 15 minutes is valued about half-as-much as increasing the frequency from once per hour to every 15 minutes.

• Check consistency of responses.

Here: Survey collector could check whether participant values the improvement of the quality of the bus stop (10%) and the comfort on the bus (10%) exactly as much as making it easy to pay the fare (20%) – otherwise ask participant to revise their weights.

• Place the attribute whose improvement would add the most value to the journey experience at the 100% mark.