Abstract
How to drive modal shift is one of the primary issues to create a sustainable society. By encouraging people to migrate from private car use to public transport, city planners can prepare for a super-aged society, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate negative externalities of private car use such as congestion, accidents, and noise. To achieve these goals, city planners are required to understand whether public transport usage can be increased by improving the service quality, and what roles user satisfaction and loyalty play in the process. The relations between service quality, user satisfaction, loyalty and user frequency have been studied for a long time. However, most of the studies are based on cross-sectional analysis. Cross-sectional analysis is less powerful in detecting causality as it does not show pre-post relations nor lagged effects between variables. To investigate causal and non-simultaneous relations among quality, satisfaction, loyalty and user frequency of public transport, we used data of the Benchmarking in European Service of Public Transport survey from 2001 to 2015 in 4 European cities, and applied Vector Auto Regressive (VAR) analysis. The result shows that improvement of service quality has positive effects on user’s satisfaction, loyalty and user frequency and that better satisfaction leads to higher loyalty and user frequency. More importantly, the result also shows that behavioral modification (change in user frequency) occurs with time lag while psychological modifications (changes in satisfaction and loyalty) occur immediately after changes in service quality. The findings suggest that city/transport planners ought to keep improving the service quality of public transport and monitoring the achievement from a long-term perspective.
Highlights
Several previous studies have argued that public transport plays a significant role in building a sustainable society
The core part of the questionnaire consists of 21 questions regarding different aspects of service quality of public transport as well as questions about satisfaction, loyalty, and user frequency
Previous studies (Lai and Chen, 2011; Frank et al, 2014; Ingvardson and Nielsen, 2019) have investigated the relationships between subjective evaluations of quality, satisfaction, loyalty, and frequency of use based on cross-sectional analyses
Summary
Several previous studies have argued that public transport plays a significant role in building a sustainable society. According to Ieda et al (2001), public transport is a vital element in creating sustainable cities with easy accessibility for the aged, which are environmentally friendly concerning energy consumption. Public transport is indispensable for creating socially sustainable communities. Some developed countries have already become “super-aged societies.”. Public transport is beneficial for individual living and for vitalizing local communities. In a rapidly aging society, economic, social, and cultural activities of local communities tend to shrink over time. Advanced public transport networks can improve intra- and inter-regional accessibility, which offers the residents and visitors more opportunities of activities (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism [MLIT], 2012), and can be a measure of keeping local communities vital and thriving
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