Abstract
Metro travelers’ travel experience is highly influenced by fellow passengers’ misbehaviors such as eating or littering in the carriage and sound blaster, which are common in the metro carriage. Although operators have implemented various regulations to reduce misbehavior, little theoretical research has investigated such behavior motivators to provide targeted guidelines for specific passenger segments. To this end, this study explores how demographic and perceived social norms of university students affect their misbehaviors, i.e., eating in the carriage, public display of affection, sound blaster, cross-legged sitting, leaning against the pole, and littering, in the metro carriage of Shanghai, China. With the structural equation model, it is revealed that both injunctive and descriptive norms impose significant impacts on passengers’ inappropriate behaviors, with the effect of the former generally to a greater degree. Gender heterogeneity in passenger misbehavior is also observed, where males significantly perform better in eating in the carriage and cross-legged sitting. These findings may decode the underlying motivation of passenger misbehaviors and provide guidelines for effective intervention with targeted policy design and implementation.
Highlights
Metro passengers may travel a long or short distance with many others in the same carriage, where social interactions are inevitable and may significantly affect trip experience [1]
Boys dominantly participated in the survey with 72% as compared to girls with 28%. e sample represents the gender-based distribution of students at Tongji University, considering the newly enrolled students’ official gender composition in 2019 to be male : female 63.4% : 36.6% [64], which is steady over the years. e survey involved most young adults around the age of 20, with the adult participants over 20 years old being 57.7%
Taking Shanghai Metro as the study context, six misbehaviors are selected on which the effect of social norms, from both injunctive and descriptive perspectives, is tested with Structural equation modeling (SEM) based on empirical data collected among college students. e estimated model reveals gender heterogeneity on the normative constructs as well as the behavior frequency
Summary
Metro passengers may travel a long or short distance with many others in the same carriage, where social interactions are inevitable and may significantly affect trip experience [1]. Besides the physical attributes of service quality, the social atmosphere in metro transit has great importance in achieving passengers’ high satisfaction, a critical issue of enhancing public transport attraction and promoting transit ridership [2, 3]. Misbehaviors in transit services can cause more consequences than fare evasion, as widely reported in social media. A news report in Brisbane, Australia, has emphasized more passenger misbehaviors, including eating and drinking on the trains, feet/bags on seats, noise in the quiet carriage, and occupying priority seats [7].
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