Development of Stated Preference (SP) technique for determining service quality of paratransit

Abstract

The transit performance measurement has been an important research of transportation planning to measure the cost efficiency, cost effectiveness, social impacts, quality of service, and equity of transit services and operations. To increase the effectiveness of the existing methodology, this study proposed an alternative method of service quality determination using Stated Preference (SP) technique. The objectives of the study were to (1) examine the previous methods of transit service quality measurement to develop an alternative tool for measuring the service quality of paratransit (in this case the passenger vans); (2) identify factors attributing to the service quality of passenger vans; (3) propose an alternative method that could be employed to measure the service quality of paratransit; (4) investigate the characteristics of passenger van services; (5) apply the measurement technique to the case of passenger van in Bangkok to draw conclusion on service quality; and (6) describe the implications of this alternative method to identify its strength and applicability. A sample of 1200 respondents was drawn from three strata pertaining to different spatial locations, specifically Inner-city, Urban-fringe, and Suburban. Moreover, the special survey of 300 respondents was drawn from urban-fringe location to develop the RP-SP models. This study has three key implications. (1) the development of stated preference (SP) technique for determining service quality; (2) the design and development of SP technique-related tools to study travel behaviours in wider aspects (3) the demonstration of the applicability of SP techniques for determining service quality of passenger vans. This developed technique can be applied to measure the service quality of paratransit modes as well as to unify the service quality measurement across public transport modes. This technique also helps situate better understandings on how people select their mode choices due to service quality levels.