Modeling service quality for public transport contracts: assessing users's perceptions

Abstract

Public transport faces a continuous decline in market share and increasing competition fromprivate car. The challenge for public transport is to find a way of maintaining and attractingclients, which implies improving the quality of the service through a market orientedapproach, particularly increasing the responsiveness to the users and potential users needsand expectations. Accordingly, service quality is becoming more and more important inpublic transport contracts.Specifying quality raises important questions in designing contracts for public transport.Quality must be unambiguously specified and monitored. To address these issues, a projectsupported by a large Portuguese urban public transport operator is being developed in order toproduce a reliable model for measuring service quality and enabling the inclusion of servicequality indicators in future contracts. The first stage of the project was based on qualitativemethods to obtain a deeper understanding of the underlying individuals perceptions of theservice and attitudes towards public transport. Namely, to figure out how and why do peopleuse or not use public transport, what factors influence these decisions, and how do customersevaluate the service offered. To grasp these questions, a series of in-depth interviews of bothpublic transport users and car users as well as to the transport operator staff were conducted.This paper presents the results of the qualitative study.