Identifying areas of interventions for improvement of shared modes for school trips

Abstract

The paper reports an investigation to identify priority areas of intervention for improvement of shared modes for school trips. The perception of parents with and without car ownership was considered while undertaking the present work. A paper-pencil based survey instrument was designed to collect importance-performance data in five-point Likert-type scale from parents of school children with respect to available modes for school trips in Kolkata city. A database of 5929 responses was developed. The priority areas of intervention were identified using revised importance-performance analysis (revised-IPA) with fuzzy c-mean clustering. The analysis technique was instrumental in classifying school trip attributes under the clusters, namely ‘basic factors’, ‘performance factors’, and ‘excitement factors’. Management schemes namely, ‘concentrate here’, ‘keep up good work’, ‘possible overkill’, and ‘low priority’, for the shared modes of school trip were identified based on the perception of parents. Priority areas of interventions for shared modes were suggested by comparing the factor structure and the management schemes. The results indicate that there is a substantial difference in the requirements of ‘car owning’ and ‘non-car owning’ parents towards shared modes of school trip. The study identified weaknesses in the shared modes of school trip and highlighted areas of interventions necessary to improve the quality of school-bus and shared-cab in the context of Kolkata city. Although the work presented here is case specific, the methodology could be used suitably in formulating policy measures for improvement of school trips considering specific mode and requirements of target user group in other urban areas.