Does the squeaky wheel get the complaint? Linking bus performance, sociodemographic characteristics, and customer comments

Abstract

Public transit agencies rely on service operations performance measures to guide service improvement efforts. They also collect customer feedback on performance to measure levels of satisfaction among users. Connecting these two performance measures can help public transport agencies increase ridership satisfaction and loyalty. In this study, we link service performance measures obtained from automatic vehicle location (AVL) and automatic passenger count (APC) with customer complaints. This is done while controlling for the amount of ridership to understand if routes with worse service performance, as identified by operations measures, also have more service complaints. We also investigated if an area’s level of affluence affects the number of service complaints per rider that the route receives while controlling for route service performance and ridership. The AVL/APC and customer-feedback data were provided by Portland, Oregon’s TriMet transport agency for the period between August 2018 and January 2019. Descriptive statistics at the route level and a series of mixed-effect multilevel logistic regression models were used to quantify the relationship between route service performance, service complaints, and a service-area vulnerability index, at the route-day level. The likelihood of receiving a service complaint for a route in a day was found to increase based on service performance and the vulnerability of the neighborhood being served by that route, all else held equal. Findings from this research unmask the relationship between service complaints, bus operations and socioeconomic characteristics of the neighborhood a route is serving, offering insights to transport planners and researchers in the psychology behind bus performance complaints.