A New Index to Measure the Quality of Urban Public Transport for International Tourists

While transport services are an integral component of tourism, the performance of urban public transport (UPT) from the perspective of international tourists remains largely unexplored. This paper develops a new index to assess the quality of UPT from the perspective of international tourists so that good performance and gaps in service can be identified. The index combines four elements of UPT important to tourists including information access, payment approaches, transport service level and special UPT service provided for tourists. The index includes weights to represent the relative importance of these elements from the perspective of international tourists based on previous research evidence. The index is applied in four case study cities: Melbourne, London, Paris and Singapore. London had the highest aggregate score (151.9 out of 200), closely followed by Paris (149.8), Melbourne (139.7) and lastly Singapore (127.6). Results suggest much room for improvement in each city, since even London achieved a total score 24% below its maximum potential. The results also give detailed information about good performance and gaps; London scored highest for Service Level and Special Tourist Services, but could improve the provision of Ticketing Discounts. By contrast, Singapore had the lowest score for Information Access due to a limited language selection and tourism information on their UPT website. Thus, the new index quantifies quality elements of UPT service for international tourists, and provides valuable information for future improvements. The paper discusses policy implications and areas for future research.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP030 Public Transportation Marketing and Fare Policy.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Yang, Yan
  • Currie, Graham
  • Peel, Victoria
  • Liu, Zhiyuan
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2015-1-11 to 2015-1-15
• Date: 2015

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 17p
• Monograph Title: TRB 94th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Performance measurement; Public transit; Quality of service; Tourism; Tourists; Urban transit
• Geographic Terms: London (England); Melbourne (Australia); Paris (France); Singapore
• Subject Areas: Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01551702
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 15-0626
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Jan 27 2015 11:24AM