Improving Travel Satisfaction with Public Transport

Abstract: The existing link between PT travelers’ satisfaction, ridership and loyalty prove the relevance of improving overall trip satisfaction. The thesis present an array of approaches and methodologies aiming at increasing overall satisfaction with PT door-to-door trips while covering important issues that previous research has failed to address. These knowledge gaps include: disregarding the different needs and priorities of different type of travelers; overlooking the evolution over time and across geographical areas that overall satisfaction and satisfaction with specific service attributes may experience; and, neglecting the importance of access and egress legs.Based on the Swedish customer satisfaction barometer (2001-2013), an investigation of the determinants of PT satisfaction and their evolution over time (I) shows that: a) the deterioration of overall satisfaction with PT in Sweden in recent years is driven by a decrease in satisfaction with customer interface and length of trip time; b) these two service aspects as well as operation are found as key determinants of overall satisfaction which users consistently rate among the least satisfactory.The diversity of needs and priorities of SKT travelers was reduced into 5 distinctive multi-modal travelers’ groups (II). These travelers’ groups exhibited geographical disparities and an in between-groups overall similarity in the importance attached to the service attributes. Nevertheless, some noticeable differences could be observed. The service attributes’ importance levels reveal overall changes in appreciations and consumption goals over time.A number of both normative and heuristic satisfaction aggregation rules are tested on METPEX dataset for different types of trip configurations (III). The results show that normative rules can better reproduce overall travel satisfaction than heuristic rules, indicating that all trip legs need to be considered when evaluating the overall travel experience.