The Influence of Passengers’ Perceived Social Responsibility Efforts on Their Satisfaction in Public-Private-Partnership Urban Rail Transit Projects

Caiyun Cui,Meng Liu,Yong Liu,Martin Skitmore,Bo Xia,Guobo Han

doi:10.3390/su132313108

Abstract

With the rapid development of public-private-partnership (PPP) urban rail transit (URT) projects in China, their social responsibility (SR) is considered to provide a useful way of guaranteeing passengers’ rights and to help urban sustainable development. However, what remains largely unknown is how passengers’ perceptions of the SR effort of such projects’ influences their satisfaction. To bridge this knowledge gap, the current study first proposes a conceptual model based on social responsibility and satisfaction theories. Hypotheses are then tested through bootstrapping analysis based on data drawn from a questionnaire survey of 436 residents from three typical PPP URT projects. The results show that the relationship between the passengers’ perceived SR effort and their satisfaction with PPP URT projects is sequentially and doubly mediated by perceived quality and perceived value. The findings contribute to the current body of knowledge in social responsibility and user satisfaction by introducing passenger-perceived SR effort as an antecedent factor, and offer valuable practical and managerial implications for the projects’ operation management to help promote urban sustainability.

Highlights

With China’s continuous economic development and urban expansion, the number of urban rail transit (URT) construction projects has grown rapidly in the past decade
The research process includes hypotheses, questionnaire design, data collection, preliminary analysis, descriptive statistics, and hypotheses testing, which leads to an empirical examination of the relationships between perceived social responsibility (SR) effort, perceived quality, perceived value, and user satisfaction
To describe how passenger perception of project SR effort influences user satisfaction with private partnership (PPP) URT projects quantitatively, the study proposed four research hypotheses based on theoretical analysis and literature review

Summary

Introduction

With China’s continuous economic development and urban expansion, the number of urban rail transit (URT) construction projects has grown rapidly in the past decade. By the end of 2019, 40 cities in mainland China were operating URT systems, with a total length of 6730.27 km [1]. This rapid development has created major fiscal and management challenges for local governments, such as large sunk investments, long-term debt, and operational uncertainty [2,3]. To address such challenges and maintain the sustainability of infrastructure projects, public–private partnership (PPP) procurement arrangements have been widely used, taking advantage of the innovation, flexibility, and financing potential of the private sector. To identify the driving factors involved, most previous studies have explored the relationship between antecedents, satisfaction, and consequences [7], and take passengers’ service perceptions

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