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Abstract
Perceptions about the quality of service are very different among public transport (PT) users. Users’ perceptions are heterogeneous for many reasons: the qualitative aspects of PT service, users’ socio-economic characteristics, and the diversity of tastes and attitudes towards PT. By analysing different groups of users who share a common characteristic (e.g. socio-economic or travel behaviour), it is possible to homogenise user opinions about the quality of service. This paper studies quality as perceived by users of the metropolitan transit system of Granada (Spain) through a classification tree technique (classification and regression trees (CART)) based on five market segmentations (gender, age, frequency of use, reason for travelling, and type of ticket). CART is a non-parametric method that has a number of advantages compared to other methods that require a predefined underlying relationship between dependent and independent variables. The study is based on data gathered in several customer satisfaction surveys (non-research-oriented) conducted in the Granada metropolitan transit system. The models' outcomes show that some attributes are very important for almost all the market segments (punctuality and information), while others are not very relevant for any of the segments – most notably fare, despite the fact that fare was stated as very important by most of the passengers during the interview.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the Granada Consorcio de Transportes for making the data set available for this study.
Funding
This study is sponsored by the Conserjería de Innovación, Ciencia y Economía of the Junta de Andalucía (Spain) through the Excellence Research Project denominated “Q-METROBUS-Quality of service indicator for METROpolitan public BUS transport services”.