User perceptions of public transport performance

Objectives

To develop a method for comparing perceptions of public transport service attributes across different customer groups
To apply the method in different world cities to measure relative performance and importance of different public transport service attributes
To explore how to efficiently illustrate findings between cities when many attributes are included.

Method

Literature review to identify key service attributes of importance to difference public transport customer groups
International survey of public transport users in nine cities to measure performance and importance of 22 public transport attributes
Spiral plot analysis to efficiently illustrate gaps between performance and importance ratings.

Key results

Performance falls below expectations for almost all public transport service attributes in each city.

Fig. 1 Difference between performance and importance of public transport attributes

Note: Solid circle line is where importance and performance scores are equal; scores below this have performance below importance and scores above it have performance above importance.

Source: Currie & Delbosc (2015)

Melbourne generally has the lowest scores all of cities, indicating the largest gaps between performance and expectations in public transport service attributes; New York tends to have the smallest gaps
Negative gaps between performance and importance of public transport service attributes are highest for ‘safe at night’, ‘disruptions don’t happen often’ and ‘travel time compared to car’
Spiral plot analysis provides a powerful means of understanding relative performance between cities and gaps in performance and expectations of public transport service attributes.