Abstract
Abstract Investigating on transit users’ opinions represents a useful strategy to understand the level of quality of a service, and consequently pursuing the most convenient interventions for satisfying users and improving the service. On the other hand, an important issue for increasing the use of transit systems is linked to the necessity to attract new users, in addition to customize the current users. For this reason, it becomes fundamental to know also the perceptions of people who do not use transit systems with the aim to discover which are the reasons of their travel choices and particularly which are the most relevant transit service aspects for them. In this work, a Stated Preferences (SP) survey was conducted in order to investigate on both transit current and potential users’ preferences. This kind of survey allows potential users opinions to be captured due to its peculiarity of the possibility to propose to interviewees hypothetical services and not only real services, which could not be judged by people who do not use the service. The collected data were adopted to calibrate discrete choice models such as Random Parameters mixed Logit models and Latent Class models. These models allow heterogeneity of users’ opinions to be analysed. Calibrating this kind of models using data collected from both users and potential users permitted to capture the differences among users in their preferences about transit service quality, and the differences among potential users in their desired service quality. Model results showed some interesting findings concerning the differences of categories of users and potential users, and especially the diversity of preferences between people who know well the service and people who could become users even if they have not a real perception of it. We also calculated the Willingness-To-Pay (WTP), which allowed to discover that the WTP values obtained for the potential users are very much higher than the values obtained for the users. The proposed models can be also useful for the practitioners and transit operators to identify the best combination of the quality levels to assign to the various service aspects.
Highlights
The quality of a service can be measured starting from the customer’s point of view through the well-known “customer satisfaction surveys”, where the interviewed customers express their opinions about the main service characteristics, traditionally in terms of rating according to an evaluation scale
We retain that the right policies for improving transit services and attracting new users have to be defined and determined by taking into account opinions of both users and potential users
The willingness to pay is a well-studied subject in the literature but, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no studies reported WTP calculation from a model referred to potential users, and there is not any study where WTP is calculated for the level of occupancy
Summary
The quality of a service can be measured starting from the customer’s point of view through the well-known “customer satisfaction surveys”, where the interviewed customers express their opinions about the main service characteristics, traditionally in terms of rating according to an evaluation scale. An important advantage of this kind of experiments is that hypothetical services can be evaluated both by current and potential users, who have the possibility to express an opinion even if they do not use the service In this way, the analyst can capture what are the opinions of the potential users, and which are the service aspects influencing their decisions of using or not public transport service. The studies investigating on public transport service quality have been generally based on the judgements of the only users of the service, while we retain that understanding the opinions of the potential users can be the key that can conduct to a significant improvement of the service quality and a greater utilization of the service Just in this context, to the largely investigated concept of expectations or importance, the concept of ‘desired quality’ can be combined, which more conveniently can be used for the potential users, who are able to express what they would desire from the service, instead what they expect. We expose and analyse the behavioural choices of current users of a bus service operating in the city of Santander (Spain), and of potential users who provide precious information useful to capture new customers
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