Relationships between rail passengers’ satisfaction and service quality: a framework for identifying the key service factors

Increasing the use of public transport is one of the most convenientstrategies for alleviating the problems resulting from the excessive use of the privatecar in most metropolitan areas (congestion, pollution, noise, etc.). In order to improvepublic transport, developing appropriate tools for measuring and monitoring servicequality is necessary. Among the various methods for measuring transit service qualitythe authors choose to adopt a method based on customer perspective because theyretain that customers have the right elements for appropriately judging the used service.Specifically, a structural equation model is formulated to explore the impact ofthe relationship between global customer satisfaction and service quality attributes,such as safety, cleanliness, main and additional services, information about the service,and personnel, and to verify which of these attributes are key factors of servicequality. Services offered by rail operators in Northern Italy are analysed (32 regionallines, 9 suburban lines, 2 express lines). Data collected by a survey addressed to asample of more than 16,000 passengers are used for calibrating the model. The proposedmodel can be useful both to transport agencies and planners to analyze thecorrelation between service quality attributes and identify the most convenient attributesfor improving the supplied service. The main findings are that information,cleanliness, and service characteristics like punctuality and frequency of runs have thehighest positive effect on service quality. In addition, the authors experimented withthe introduction of indicators explaining the endogenous latent variable different fromthe traditionally used indicators, such as an index based on both satisfaction andimportance rates.