How Do Stakeholders Perceive Transit Service Quality Attributes? – A study through Fuzzy-AHP

Abstract

This study examines stakeholders’ perspective about nine major attribute sets which comprehensively define transit service quality. A novel linguistic AHP scale was used to form a judgement matrix based on experts’ opinion which simplifies the understanding between two criteria and thus respondents’ (stakeholders) fatigue and complexities reduces while filling the survey. The Saaty’s bi-directional scale is made unidirectional by applying the linguistic scale as extremely lower (reciprocal values) to equal and then to extremely higher. Stakeholders were from different fields of expertise like academia, research, policy makers, service operators or providers, and industry professionals. A judgement matrix was arrived at through Fuzzy-AHP analysis while using disaggregated and aggregated opinions of the stakeholders. The stakeholders’ opinion was analyzed as: individual stakeholders’ groups; academicians vs non-academicians; and combined opinion. One-way ANOVA test was performed to examine the similarity in decision making across the stakeholders. Though no statistical significance was found across stakeholder level, however, the perceptions vary or sync across the groups based on attributes’ inherent value or characteristics. The matrix allowed the categorization of the attributes based on their importance as highly, moderately, and least important. Higher importance has gone to infrastructure (system infrastructure, and ease and convenience) and operational attributes (Customer service, comfort, and service frequency) whereas, lower importance has gone to functional attributes (safety, security, and travel time reliability). The analysis allows us to arrive at probable weights which shall be given to the different attributes while planning for the improvements in the transit services in a geographical region.