Comfort-factor.

[AvG]

James,
For my pricing system of vehicles I need some insight in your ideas about the comfort-factor.
What approach do you use when making the % of comfort? What are the influences?

I think that in general more comfort means more expensive vehicles.
AvG

[jamespetts]

For vehicles, comfort is more correlated with density than price: the more space that people have in a vehicle, the more comfortable that it is, but the fewer people can fit in. To some extent, better padded seats, etc., will cost a little more to buy, but probably not a great deal more to maintain. One should not over-generalise, however: the important thing for Pak128.Britain-Ex is to be as historically accurate as possible in every respect. So, some particular innovations in vehicle design, such as bogie carriages as opposed to fixed wheel carriages, do substantially increase the comfort and cost, whereas other things that affect the comfort - such as simply giving passengers more space - have no effect on the cost at all. Comfort can also affect loading times: trains with fast loading times have lots of doors down the side of the carriages, but that is drafty and noisy and passengers, in the most extreme cases, have to endure people getting on and off right in front of their seats. Note, however, that increasing the number of doors per carriage actually increases the cost.

What I am planning to do is to gather as much accurate information as possible about the relative pricing of different sorts of vehicles and then extrapolate that to cover the individual sorts of vehicles present in the pakset. There will not be a system correlating the actual comfort ratings with prices, because that would be unrealistic: the idea is to take into account the real-life characteristics of the vehicles that affect their price and use as realistic values for the comfort as possible.

[ӔO]

the difference between first class and second/economy class for flights and trains are pretty obvious.
They can both be crowded, but it's not that obtrusive if you're in first class. If you're in economy class it's not very comfortable at all. Revenue wise, economy class is better.

[AvG]

James,
The price of pax-vehicles has to be dependable on comfort some way.
Maybe it is a realistic approach to multiply the price from the normal calculation by 1,3 in a case of comfort=30
Could you live with this?
AvG

[jamespetts]

AvG,

I don't really understand. What do you mean by "normal calculation" here? The price should be based on - and only on - the realistic relative costings of the individual vehicles in so far as they can be ascertained.

[AvG]

James,
I have developed an Excel-matrix where you have to input values (in case of pax-carriage) for year, pax-nr, weight and speed. These values result in vehicle price and running costs.
Lots of influence are involved like commodity-prices, inflation, efficiency, etc.
It might be clear that we may speak also of a lot  of educated guess-work.
If however some value is wrong then the results will be wrong also, but the proportion between all vehicles wil stay allright.
So if comfort is added as an input-value (30%) I can multiply the vehicle-price by 1,3 and the job is done.
AvG

[jamespetts]

Hmm, I don't think that that approach will produce realistic values, as, as explained above, there is no determinate correlation between those figures and the actual cost of vehicles.