Transit Service Quality Evaluation for a Sustainable Transportation System

Transit service quality is a subject that has aroused considerable interest both in academic research and in public and private service sectors. Specifically in public transport, service quality is a matter of the greatest importance because an improvement of quality levels can attract further users. An increase of public transport use with a concurrent reduction of the use of private car could sort out many problems, like traffic congestion, air and noise pollution, and energy consumption.For these reasons, the measurement of transit performance has been, and will continue to be, an important concern for allocating resources among competing transit agencies. Scientific research is ever more oriented towards the establishment of appropriate transit performance measures and indicators. Specific measures defining transit performance include efficiency, effectiveness, and service quality. Service quality can be evaluated by considering customer perceptions and expectations, or by a range of simple disaggregate performance measures which can be used for measuring the ability of the transit agency to offer services that meet customer expectations. Both passenger perceptions and measures provided by transit agencies are fundamental for evaluating the performance of a transit service.Passengers’ perceptions can be analysed in many different ways, including methods of statistical analysis for determining the impact of the attributes on the global service quality and customer satisfaction, and mathematical models which allow the relationship among variables to be explored, and passengers’ choice behaviour to be simulated. There are also some procedures and methods for calculating performance indicators based on data providing from measurements on the field or by transit agencies, which provide a more objective measure of service quality. The chapter aims to an as comprehensive as possible interpretative review of the different methods for measuring transit service quality, by differing between methods based on the use of performance data and methods based on the use of passengers’ perceptions, and by describing the state of the research about this subject.

Il capitolo è finalizzato a effettuare una rassegna esaustiva delle differenti tecniche di misura della qualità dei servizi, in modo da operare un confronto tra le stesse e delinearne vantaggi e svantaggi. È effettuata una differenziazione tra metodi basati sull’uso di indicatori di performance delle aziende e metodi basati sulle percezioni degli utenti.