Public Transport Modes: Measuring user quality perceptions and preferences in Cape Town

Walaza, Sandisile

Public Transport Modes: Measuring user quality perceptions and preferences in Cape Town

Thesis / Dissertation

2023

Abstract

Public transport has become increasingly important in developing nations, playing a pivotal role as the primary mode of transportation for economic, social, and cultural endeavours for numerous individuals. While there has been extensive research on the technical aspects of public transport, the customer's perspective has received limited attention. Passenger's perception of the individual characteristics of the service plays a crucial role in evaluating service quality. Therefore, it is important to identify the factors that significantly influence the overall assessment of the service and those that have minimal impact. Understanding the order and magnitude of the importance of these external factors is of great importance to service providers when wanting to improve user experiences, for planning purposes, for marketing purposes as well as for fare setting. Considering this, the primary focus of this research is to provide empirical evidence on the existence of a hierarchy in transportation needs. Such evidence is provided in this research by investigating the existence of a user quality pyramid on public transport modes as claimed in literature. We do this for the City of Cape Town using the Best-Worst Scaling (BWS) method, which measures consumer priorities in a manner that is robust and transparent, by compelling respondents to make trade-offs among items. BWS is a survey technique of measuring individuals' priorities as it identifies the extremes in a given list as best as well as worst items and is used in other disciplines where prioritisation of items is required to guide decisions. In this study, 282 public transport users rank the best and the worst quality attributes in a given set of 14 quality attributes. The research findings indicate that travel time followed by affordability are the most important quality attributes in regional public transport modes. Equally, in- vehicle security followed by service transfers are the least important public transport quality attributes. We use this to construct and comment on the user quality pyramid. Index Terms Best-worst scaling, Public Transport, user quality perceptions and preferences, quality attributes

Keywords

Engineering

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