Public Transportation Quality of Service

Factors, Models, and Applications

Luigi Dell´Olio, Angel Ibeas, Juan de Ona, Rocio de Ona

• Publisher: Elsevier
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780081022795
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Transportation & Navigation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Public Transportation Quality of Service: Factors, Models, and Applications is the first book to help researchers better understand the contributing factors that can improve public transportation perception among users. The book compiles in one place metrics currently dispersed in journal articles, government publications and book chapters. It critically analyzes currently available modeling methodologies such as the Ordered Logit/Probit model and Models of Structural Equations, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages. The book addresses models of desired quality, including the views of users and non-users, discussing the gap between desired and perceived quality.

The book also examines data mining approaches such as decision trees and neural networks, showing how to involve the public in the decision-making process to create policies that encourage public transport demand. Measuring passenger's views on public transportation is of critical concern to promote wider transit use in cities around the world.

• Includes insights from both theoretical and practical points of view for both researchers and practitioners
• Features case studies in each chapter that apply models discussed
• Helps readers develop and design their own studies for measuring quality of service
• Shows how to include perceived quality in contracts
• Provides access to the survey formulas and data to better enable implementation of models

Chapter 1

Introduction

Contents

References

To understand the quality of service that users of public transport perceive they are receiving is a modern requirement. As stated by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1988), the improvement of quality is a business strategy that adds value to a service and helps differentiate it from its competitors. Market research carried out in the transport sector has shown the important role users have in evaluating service performance and highlighted the subjectivity of their perceptions. Although they may sometimes appear strange, the preferences of users need to be considered by the operating companies and the supervising agencies. Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1985) proposed considering the points of view of both the service providers and the customers in order to measure the discrepancies between user expectations and transport agency objectives.

Demand has a direct relationship with perceived quality and this relationship is what has motivated the development of many applied research works such as the multiple studies on the design of performance-based contracts in the transport sector (Hensher & Prioni, 2002; Hensher, Stopher, & Bullock, 2003; Mokonyama & Venter, 2013), which are aimed at giving the companies incentives to improve their performance and penalizing those that do not provide a quality service.

Evidently there is a dilemma as to whether or not an improvement in performance will have a direct and immediate effect on increasing the demand. Friman (2004) stated that the level of satisfaction felt by users due to service improvements cannot rise without end and does, therefore, have a limit. By observing how user perception changed with improvements made to the system, they realized that users do not always perceive these changes as a positive thing or where they do perceive them, the changes do not always influence their satisfaction levels. This leads to the understanding that it is important to know how users behave and how their satisfaction levels can be influenced or not by changes made to the system.

By performing research in this field, we are able to achieve two fundamental targets:

• Find solutions that maximize user satisfaction.

• Improve the system at an acceptable cost by avoiding unnecessary expense on parts of the service that have no influence on user satisfaction.

We also need to establish what perceived quality actually means. It could be the quality of certain goods or a service compared with similar goods or services or it may simply be the level of quality provided by the goods or services on their own.

These two definitions define two concepts of quality:

• Relative perceived quality

• Absolute perceived quality

Given the assumption that no clear distinction is available in the international literature for these two concepts, we can state that satisfaction is normally associated with relative perceived quality, where the reference is toward the users' own experiences or expectations.

Therefore, when we speak about relative perceived quality, we need to be clear that our perceived quality refers to something that in the literature is called expected quality or which some studies define as desired quality (dell'Olio, Ibeas, & Cecin, 2011). Parasuraman, Berry, and Zeithaml (1991) opened the debate about whether or not different types of expectation existed and finally distinguished between “adequate service quality” and “desired service quality” with a “zone of tolerance” between the two levels of quality (Parasuraman, 1994). The level of satisfaction can, therefore, be defined as the subjective measure relative to the expectations or desires of the users, whereas the absolute perceived quality is an overall evaluation of the current level of quality without being subjected to any reference value.

All these topics are going to be addressed in this book and in particular we are going to provide an overall view of the diverse techniques currently used for measuring perceived quality and how these concepts can be applied to transport contracts to help improve services.

The book is divided into 11 chapters including the present introductory chapter. The second chapter aims to provide an overall view about the beginnings of and how the analysis of user perceived quality has developed in the field of public transport services (de Oña & de Oña, 2015). The main methods of analysis used to evaluate quality will be presented by differentiating them into aggregate methods and disaggregate methods and further differentiating between methods based only on perceptions and those based on user expectations and perceptions together. Among other methods, brief descriptions will be made of the SERVQUAL model (Parasuraman et al., 1988), the SERVPERF (service performance) model (Carrillat, Jaramillo, & Mulki, 2007), the importance-performance analysis (IPA) model, Zones of Tolerance (Hu, 2010), and some of their variations.

Chapter 3 will introduce techniques to encourage citizen participation in qualitative research, highlighting the importance of public opinion in the planning and management of transport (Ibeas, dell'Olio, & Montequín, 2011). This chapter is very important because it helps us in how to choose the relevant variables for the models and in the estimation of perceived and expected quality.

Chapter 4 describes the survey design process for users of public transport. User satisfaction surveys are differentiated from stated preferences surveys and different methods are described for establishing survey samples, which are able to represent the characteristics of public transport users and their evaluations of the service (Fowler, 2014).

The main geosocial differences found in the analysis of public transport service quality from a user's point of view are presented in Chapter 5. The different territorial contexts are classified on a world scale in accordance with the per capita Gross National Income of each nation and this classification is used to address the main differences found between them (e.g., Abenoza, Cats, & Susilo, 2017; Irfan, Mui, Kee, & Shahbaz, 2012; Tyrinopoulos & Antoniou, 2008). Furthermore, the variables identified as being of greatest importance for the users are presented according to public transport industry, field of operation, and territorial context.

Chapter 6 introduces a series of methodologies, which can be used for determining the most influential factors in the study of public transport quality. The methods aimed at determining the importance of the main influential factors on public transport quality are presented first and two of these methods are further developed: factorial analysis and IPA. This is followed in the second part of the chapter by a series of indices and procedures, which have been used in the study of public transport quality: SERVQUAL, SERVPERF, and QUATTRO (Quality approach in tendering urban public transport operations) (European Commission, 1998).

Various methods based on random utility theory that consider systematic variations in user taste (Greene & Hensher, 2010) are presented in Chapter 7. Different model specifications are proposed to find the relative importance of each variable (Echaniz, dell'Olio, & Ibeas, 2017). These models apply random utility theory in order to study ordered data from a qualitative satisfaction scale considering the nonlinearity present on the scale to be modeled.

Chapter 8 presents structural equations models as being one of the most commonly used techniques for analyzing user perceived quality in the field of public transport as well as the attitudes of users toward the service (Chou, Lu, & Chang, 2014). This method allows us to estimate the effect and relationships between multiple variables and provides an overall view of different aspects of the studied phenomena (Hair, Black, Babin, & Anderson, 2010).

Chapter 9 describes some of the data mining techniques that have been used in the evaluation and modeling of public transport quality. The three most commonly used techniques are artificial neuron networks (Garrido, de Oña, & de Oña, 2014), Bayesian networks (Perucca & Salini, 2014) and decision trees (de Oña, de Oña, & Calvo, 2012). The chapter ends with a comparative analysis of the main advantages and disadvantages of each of these three data mining techniques.

The concept of ...