Modeling service quality for public transport contracts: assessing users's perceptions

• Type: Article in International Conference Proceedings Book
• Date: 2005

Authors

Gabriela Beirão (Author) FEUP; José Sarsfield Cabral (Author) FEUP

Conference proceedings International

Title: Comunicação apresentada na 9th Conference on Competition and Ownership in Land Transport

Other information

Abstract (EN): Public transport faces a continuous decline in market share and increasing competition from private car. The challenge for public transport is to find a way of maintaining and attracting clients, which implies improving the quality of the service through a market oriented approach, particularly increasing the responsiveness to the users¿ and potential users¿ needs and expectations. Accordingly, service quality is becoming more and more important in public transport contracts. Specifying quality raises important questions in designing contracts for public transport. Quality must be unambiguously specified and monitored. To address these issues, a project supported by a large Portuguese urban public transport operator is being developed in order to produce a reliable model for measuring service quality and enabling the inclusion of service quality indicators in future contracts. The first stage of the project was based on qualitative methods to obtain a deeper understanding of the underlying individuals perceptions of the service and attitudes towards public transport. Namely, to figure out how and why do people use or not use public transport, what factors influence these decisions, and how do customers evaluate the service offered. To grasp these questions, a series of in-depth interviews of both public transport users and car users as well as to the transport operator staff were conducted. This paper presents the results of the qualitative study.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 15