CHAPTER 1

Introduction
Contents
References 5

To understand the quality of service that users of public transport perceive

they are receiving is a modern requirement. As stated by Parasuraman,
Zeithaml, and Berry (1988), the improvement of quality is a business
strategy that adds value to a service and helps differentiate it from its
competitors. Market research carried out in the transport sector has shown
the important role users have in evaluating service performance and
highlighted the subjectivity of their perceptions. Although they may
sometimes appear strange, the preferences of users need to be considered
by the operating companies and the supervising agencies. Parasuraman,
Zeithaml, and Berry (1985) proposed considering the points of view of
both the service providers and the customers in order to measure the
discrepancies between user expectations and transport agency objectives.
Demand has a direct relationship with perceived quality and this
relationship is what has motivated the development of many applied
research works such as the multiple studies on the design of performance-
based contracts in the transport sector (Hensher & Prioni, 2002; Hensher,
Stopher, & Bullock, 2003; Mokonyama & Venter, 2013), which are aimed
at giving the companies incentives to improve their performance and
penalizing those that do not provide a quality service.
Evidently there is a dilemma as to whether or not an improvement in
performance will have a direct and immediate effect on increasing the
demand. Friman (2004) stated that the level of satisfaction felt by users due
to service improvements cannot rise without end and does, therefore, have
a limit. By observing how user perception changed with improvements
made to the system, they realized that users do not always perceive these
changes as a positive thing or where they do perceive them, the changes do
not always influence their satisfaction levels. This leads to the understanding
that it is important to know how users behave and how their satisfaction
levels can be influenced or not by changes made to the system.
Public Transportation Quality of Service
ISBN 978-0-08-102080-7 © 2018 Elsevier Ltd.
[Link] All rights reserved. 1
2 Public Transportation Quality of Service

By performing research in this field, we are able to achieve two

fundamental targets:
• Find solutions that maximize user satisfaction.
• Improve the system at an acceptable cost by avoiding unnecessary
expense on parts of the service that have no influence on user
satisfaction.
We also need to establish what perceived quality actually means. It
could be the quality of certain goods or a service compared with similar
goods or services or it may simply be the level of quality provided by the
goods or services on their own.
These two definitions define two concepts of quality:
• Relative perceived quality
• Absolute perceived quality
Given the assumption that no clear distinction is available in the inter-
national literature for these two concepts, we can state that satisfaction is
normally associated with relative perceived quality, where the reference
is toward the users’ own experiences or expectations.
Therefore, when we speak about relative perceived quality, we need to
be clear that our perceived quality refers to something that in the literature
is called expected quality or which some studies define as desired quality
(dell’Olio, Ibeas, & Cecin, 2011). Parasuraman, Berry, and Zeithaml (1991)
opened the debate about whether or not different types of expectation
existed and finally distinguished between “adequate service quality” and
“desired service quality” with a “zone of tolerance” between the two levels
of quality (Parasuraman, 1994). The level of satisfaction can, therefore, be
defined as the subjective measure relative to the expectations or desires of
the users, whereas the absolute perceived quality is an overall evaluation of
the current level of quality without being subjected to any reference value.
All these topics are going to be addressed in this book and in particular
we are going to provide an overall view of the diverse techniques currently
used for measuring perceived quality and how these concepts can be
applied to transport contracts to help improve services.
The book is divided into 11 chapters including the present introductory
chapter. The second chapter aims to provide an overall view about the
beginnings of and how the analysis of user perceived quality has developed
in the field of public transport services (de Oña & de Oña, 2015). The main
methods of analysis used to evaluate quality will be presented by differ-
entiating them into aggregate methods and disaggregate methods and
 Introduction 3

further differentiating between methods based only on perceptions and

those based on user expectations and perceptions together. Among other
methods, brief descriptions will be made of the SERVQUAL model
(Parasuraman et al., 1988), the SERVPERF (service performance) model
(Carrillat, Jaramillo, & Mulki, 2007), the importance-performance analysis
(IPA) model, Zones of Tolerance (Hu, 2010), and some of their variations.
Chapter 3 will introduce techniques to encourage citizen participation
in qualitative research, highlighting the importance of public opinion in the
planning and management of transport (Ibeas, dell’Olio, & Montequín,
2011). This chapter is very important because it helps us in how to choose
the relevant variables for the models and in the estimation of perceived and
expected quality.
Chapter 4 describes the survey design process for users of public
transport. User satisfaction surveys are differentiated from stated preferences
surveys and different methods are described for establishing survey samples,
which are able to represent the characteristics of public transport users and
their evaluations of the service (Fowler, 2014).
The main geosocial differences found in the analysis of public transport
service quality from a user’s point of view are presented in Chapter 5. The
different territorial contexts are classified on a world scale in accordance
with the per capita Gross National Income of each nation and this classi-
fication is used to address the main differences found between them (e.g.,
Abenoza, Cats, & Susilo, 2017; Irfan, Mui, Kee, & Shahbaz, 2012;
Tyrinopoulos & Antoniou, 2008). Furthermore, the variables identified as
being of greatest importance for the users are presented according to public
transport industry, field of operation, and territorial context.
Chapter 6 introduces a series of methodologies, which can be used for
determining the most influential factors in the study of public transport
quality. The methods aimed at determining the importance of the main
influential factors on public transport quality are presented first and two of
these methods are further developed: factorial analysis and IPA. This is
followed in the second part of the chapter by a series of indices and
procedures, which have been used in the study of public transport quality:
SERVQUAL, SERVPERF, and QUATTRO (Quality approach in
tendering urban public transport operations) (European Commission,
1998).
Various methods based on random utility theory that consider sys-
tematic variations in user taste (Greene & Hensher, 2010) are presented in
Chapter 7. Different model specifications are proposed to find the relative
4 Public Transportation Quality of Service

importance of each variable (Echaniz, dell’Olio, & Ibeas, 2017). These

models apply random utility theory in order to study ordered data from a
qualitative satisfaction scale considering the nonlinearity present on the scale
to be modeled.
Chapter 8 presents structural equations models as being one of the most
commonly used techniques for analyzing user perceived quality in the field
of public transport as well as the attitudes of users toward the service (Chou,
Lu, & Chang, 2014). This method allows us to estimate the effect and
relationships between multiple variables and provides an overall view of
different aspects of the studied phenomena (Hair, Black, Babin, & Anderson,
2010).
Chapter 9 describes some of the data mining techniques that have been
used in the evaluation and modeling of public transport quality. The three
most commonly used techniques are artificial neuron networks (Garrido, de
Oña, & de Oña, 2014), Bayesian networks (Perucca & Salini, 2014) and
decision trees (de Oña, de Oña, & Calvo, 2012). The chapter ends with a
comparative analysis of the main advantages and disadvantages of each of
these three data mining techniques.
The concept of desired quality is introduced in Chapter 10 as being
what the users and potential users expect they should receive from a public
transport service (dell’Olio, Ibeas, & Cecin, 2011). A methodology is
proposed to determine this aspect using stated preferences surveys, followed
by the estimation of logit type discrete choice models aimed at modeling
and analyzing the results (dell’Olio, Ibeas, Cecín, & dell’Olio, 2011).
Chapter 11 introduces a new methodology for the inclusion of quality
parameters in public transport contracts by using a system of incentives for
operators to invest in making service improvements (Rojo, dell’Olio,
Gonzalo-Orden, & Ibeas, 2015). This approach makes investing a more
attractive option for the operating companies. The results are quite positive:
without increasing the overall amount invested by the overseeing admin-
istrations improvements were seen in the quality of service as perceived by
the current users and demand for public transport increased (thereby
reducing externalities from private car use) with an acceptable profit margin
for the operators.
The codes for the software NLogit (Greene, 2007) have been added to
Chapters 7 and 10 to make it easier for the end users of this book to
reproduce the results of this research.
 Introduction 5

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