Transit quality evaluation: processes conducted by managers and operators

Abstract

The development of quality policies applied to the public transport sector has increased the operators and managers interest in ensuring passengers’ satisfaction standards; therefore, their actions have been instrumented through the quality of service perception. In this context, the research project GESCAL performs a comparative analysis about the evaluation techniques used by the operators, from the passengers’ point of view, as a tool that support the service quality management. This comparison shapes the innovative nature of this research. This paper presents, the diversity of procedures carried out at a national level for evaluating passengers’ perceptions about the transit service quality. Some conclusions are obtained through a qualitative analysis based on in-depth interviews conducted to operators and administrations of different public transport services (bus, train, tramway and light rail services in the urban, metropolitan and interurban contexts).These results permit to affirm that these procedures are to a large extent standardized, but the implemented methodologies are heterogeneous between organizations due to the influence of the exogenous context and different endogenous factors of the organization. Likewise, the objectives of the quality evaluation service campaigns can be affected by these conditioning factors and, in some cases there is no correspondence between the applied methodology and the postulated objectives