Perceived Service Quality in Urban Rail Transit: a Comparison of Structural Equation Models

Promoting transit services requires a deep understanding of service quality and in turn factors that affect passenger satisfaction. There are objective and subjective means to evaluate service quality. Since people are attracted to transit services based on their own subjective perception, the judgment provided by transit users is what matters. However, there are various approaches in the literature to model service quality in which different lists of factors are identified which in turn affect passenger satisfaction. This paper aims to test the transferability of these approaches to another city. The common essence of the compared approaches is to evaluate the relationship between perceived service quality and customer satisfaction using a structural equation model (SEM). Four classes of approaches were tested to identify the factors affecting service quality: 1) recommendations of previously published models from the literature, 2) an established customer satisfaction theory, 3) adopting an exploratory approach, and 4) a formal model development procedure which combined the previous three approaches. Tehran Metro Line 3, which is a heavy urban rail transit, was used as a case study. Three hundred validated responses were collected through a customer satisfaction survey. The results indicate that none of the first three approaches were directly transferable to the case study. The best model is developed when the entire modeling procedure is repeated using a wide range of affecting factors and gradually narrowing them down through model development. The final model consisted of four latent variables, namely major services, comfort, security and minor services, the first two of which had the largest effect on service quality.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP015 Standing Committee on Transit Capacity and Quality of Service.
• Authors:
  • Soltanpour, Amirali
  • Mesbah, Mahmoud
  • Habibian, Meeghat
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
• Date: 2018

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 18p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Passenger comfort; Passenger security; Quality of service; Rail transit; Structural equation modeling
• Geographic Terms: Tehran (Iran)
• Subject Areas: Passenger Transportation; Public Transportation; Railroads;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01663666
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 18-05752
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 22 2018 11:57AM