Abstract
Improving the quality of the city bus service is an important topic for public transportation management. One way of measuring this improvement is to measure the gap between the passengers’ expectation and their perception. The expectation can be divided into desired service and adequate service, and the difference between these two is the tolerant zone of expectation. The present study has two purposes. The first is to propose a model for evaluating service quality based on the zone of tolerance of expectation (ZSQ). The second is to build an analytical framework for prioritizing attributes (NIZSQ, normalized importance–ZSQ analysis) through a quadrant analysis based on ZSQ and normalized importance. This research took the Taipei city bus service as an example. The data were collected by means of questionnaires. Statistical analysis was adopted to test the hypotheses. The result showed that the top two priorities for improvement are those attributes that are relevant to the interaction with the passengers, and the support from operations management.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the support of the National Science Council of the Republic of China in Taiwan in funding this research (NSC‐942416H424006). We are also thankful to the anonymous reviewers of Transport Reviews who provided very useful comments and guidance.