User satisfaction and service quality improvement priority of bus rapid transit in Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Name
CSTP_final.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
1.25 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
4584ed06280a6e015ff50467afe5f297
Author(s)
Zheng, Yunhan
Kong, Hui
Petzhold, Guillermo
Barcelos, Mariana M
Zegras, Christopher P
Zhao, Jinhua
Date Issued
December 2021
Journal
Case Studies on Transport Policy
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Citation
Zheng, Yunhan, Kong, Hui, Petzhold, Guillermo, Barcelos, Mariana M, Zegras, Christopher P et al. 2021. "User satisfaction and service quality improvement priority of bus rapid transit in Belo Horizonte, Brazil." Case Studies on Transport Policy, 9 (4).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
The implementation of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is intended to provide higher-quality services and significantly improve rider satisfaction. Previous studies have investigated rider satisfaction and its determinants to improve BRT services as well as the comparison between BRT and conventional bus/rail transit regarding the rider satisfaction. However, many of previous studies have assumed that service attributes have linear and symmetric influences on rider satisfaction, and among the very few studies that capture the non-linear or asymmetric relationship, there is no combination of different methods to achieve the advantages of both. Besides, to our knowledge, no previous studies have examined changes in the performance and importance of different service attributes after BRT implementation. This paper analyzes the QualiÔnibus rider satisfaction survey data in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and compares rider satisfaction and the importance of service attributes to overall satisfaction across three cases: two years prior to the BRT implementation, one year after the BRT was implemented, and four years after the BRT implementation. A combination of the ordinal logit regression (OLR) approach and random forest (RF) approach is adopted, which enables a nonlinear relationship between service attributes and rider satisfaction, considers the impact effect size in determining the importance of service attributes, and captures the attitudinal randomness of different riders when rating their satisfaction. Our results show that “expenses with public transport” (i.e. fares) should be addressed first among all the attributes, and the improvement priorities of “speed”, “reliability” and “customer service” increased after the BRT opening. These findings can help policymakers fine-tune improvement strategies targeted at different types of services.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
10.1016/j.cstp.2021.10.011
