The 2007-08 French National Travel Survey (FNTS) included questions about the trip experience for a random subsample of the respondents' daily travel, offering a rare opportunity to examine a national profile of attitudes toward travel. This study analyzes the self-reported (mental and/or physical) fatigue associated with the selected trip, and its (un)pleasantness. Only 8% of trips were tiring, and fewer than 4% were unpleasant, indicating that travel is by no means universally distasteful. We present a bivariate probit model of the mental and physical fatigue associated with the trip, and binary logit models of whether the trip was pleasant (yes/no) or unpleasant (yes/no). For the most part, socioeconomic variables and indicators of trip length, distance, purpose, and mode have logical relationships to fatigue and pleasantness. However, 11 variables out of 31 common to both sets of models have impacts on fatigue that are opposite to those on un/pleasantness, pointing to conditions under which a trip can be fatiguing but pleasant, or conversely. Accordingly, a key contribution of the research is to demonstrate the value of jointly considering both constructs in order to more comprehensively capture the overall attitudes toward the travelling activity. It is also of interest that activities conducted during the trip appear in both sets of models. In particular, the results suggest that although listening to the radio/music decreases the tendency to rate the trip as mentally fatiguing, it tends to be seen as ameliorating the disutility of a tedious trip more than increasing the pleasantness of the trip. Among the policy-relevant findings, we note the especially negative attitudes towards multimodal trips and trips mainly involving driving cars.
This paper proposes a self-contained reference for both policy makers and scholars who want to address the problem of efficiency and effectiveness of local public transport (LPT), with special emphasis on urban transit, in a sound empirical way. Framing economic efficiency studies into a transport planning perspective, it offers a critical discussion of the existing empirical studies, relating them to the main methodological approaches used. The connection between such perspectives and Operations Research studies dealing with scheduling and tactical design of public transport services is also developed. The comprehensive classification of selected relevant dimensions of the empirical literature, namely inputs, outputs, kind of data analysed, methods adopted and policy relevant questions addressed, and the systematic investigation of their interrelationships allows us to summarise the existing literature and to propose desirable developments and extensions for future studies in the field
The importance of measuring customer satisfaction for a public transport service is apparent, even beyond more immediate marketing purposes. The present paper shows how satisfaction measures can be exploited to gain insights on the relationship between personal attitudes, transit use and urban context. We consider nine satisfaction measures of urban transit services, as expressed by a representative sample of Italian multimodal travelers (i.e. users of both private cars and public transport). We use correlations and correspondence analyses to show if and how each attribute is related to the levels of use of public transport, and how the relationship is affected by the urban context. Then we apply a recently developed method to combine ordinal variables into one score, by adapting it to work with large samples and with satisfaction measures which have a neutral point in the scale (i.e. "neither satisfied nor dissatisfied"). The resulting overall satisfaction levels and frequency of use were not correlated in our sample. We also found the highest satisfaction levels in smaller towns and the lowest ones in metropolitan cities. Since we focus on multimodal travelers, an interpretation paradigm is proposed according to which transit services must be well evaluated by car drivers in smaller towns in order to be considered a real alternative to cars. On the other hand, transit is more competitive on factual elements in larger cities, so that it can still be used by drivers, even if it is not very well evaluated.
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