The Role of Passengers' Satisfaction with Transit Service Quality - Dissecting Customer Satisfaction

Abstract

Many large US transit agencies see high levels of ridership turnover, but currently, little is known about how turnover can be predicted. In an effort to better understand customers, many transit agencies conduct surveys at regular intervals, and a key element of those surveys are questions regarding satisfaction. This thesis dissects the relationship between satisfaction with public transportation services and passengers future travel behavior. The goal of this thesis is to show how satisfaction with transit services influences transit customer loyalty. Speci cally, it is composed of three parts: First, it assesses the potential association between transit user behavior and satisfaction ratings using Chi-Square Tests. Second, using an exploratory factor analysis, it presents a model to summarize a variety of satisfaction variables with a smaller number of underlying, latent factors. Third, it analyzes the predictive power of satisfaction regarding future behavior through a structural equation model. The public transportation system that this work focuses on is the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, or "Muni" for short. By analyzing survey data collected at multiple points in time, several notable ndings are made, including that low satisfaction ratings with respect to service reliability appear to be associated with a decrease in transit use. It is also shown that the set of satisfaction variables presented in the survey can be summarized by four latent variables -satisfaction with reliability, the travel environment, comfort, and the schedule, respectively. Furthermore, the results suggest that the link between overall satisfaction and future changes in behavior is more complex than anticipated.