Characterizing, measuring, and managing transit service quality

Abstract

SUMMARYRecent studies to evaluate the quality of transit service are generating a good amount of renewed interest in an old idea, the passenger's perspective; this new interest stems from recognizing that transit service quality should be characterised, measured, and managed by parameters capturing both passenger and transit operator perspectives. However, although the selected parameters are user-oriented in their input, the output may not be as user-oriented as considered, and the number or the percentage of passengers is often neglected. As a result, the findings are often misleading because the perspectives of transit operators dominate. Therefore, academics and practitioners must rethink their strategies of quality analysis of public transportation by stressing more on the role of passengers. These challenges are addressed in this paper with a practical, simple, and holistic framework, for Transit Quality (TRANSQUAL). This framework provides for the involvement of all stakeholders in the characterisation, measurement, and management of the stages of quality monitoring, which is jointly analyzed at different planning levels. In the characterization stage, the framework supports the selection of parameters to be monitored. The measurement stage sets and measures four quality areas in terms of percentage of passengers who expect a predefined level of service, for whom the service is designed, who receive the planned service, and who perceive the service as delivered. The management stage computes the differences between these percentages, points out criticalities, and recommends corrective actions. These stages are investigated in-depth, integrated, and discussed in a real-life case study.

Empirical Study on the Accuracy and Precision of Automatic Passenger Counting in European Bus Services

“…As for precision, direct and inverse regression models were adopted to test the relative effect of measurement error as suggested by [35,36].…”

Which service is better on a linear travel corridor: Park & ride or on-demand public bus?

“…Moccia and Laporte (2016) considered optimal stop spacing, train length, crowding cost, and multiple periods in their service selection model, and tested this model in an illustrative example. Barabino and Di Francesco (2016) developed a framework for the involvement of all stakeholders in the characterisation, measurement, and management of the stages of quality monitoring, which was jointly analyzed at different planning levels. Sun et al (2017) explored how the selection of public service can be optimized over a planning horizon.…”

Selecting Key Quality Indicators in Public Transport Systems Using a Robust Method

“…Therefore, we must further decompose these components into more manageable attributes. According to [15], the methodological attributes are as follows:…”

“…The same reference [15] documents that the relevance of indicators to the concept of service quality includes four main attributes:  Integration of users' and public transport company (PTC)'s views to re-orient the organisation as one that is customer-centred.  User-orientation to avoid PTC-oriented parameters.…”

“…In this paper, we propose a robust methodology for identifying and selecting KQIs using both data collected through international surveys and Monte Carlo simulation methods. This methodology builds on the first block of TRANSQUAL, which recommends the use of a robust methodology for KQIs selection [15]. This methodology differs from ELASTIC, which is a framework for the identification and selection of sustainable transport indicators developed by UK experts only [17].…”