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Public Transport Modes: Measuring user quality perceptions and preferences in Cape Town
Public transport has become increasingly important in developing nations, playing a pivotal role as the primary mode of transportation for economic, social, and cultural endeavours for numerous individuals. While there has been extensive research on the technical aspects of public transport, the cus...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | Eng |
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Department of Civil Engineering
2024
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| _version_ | 1867613262705590272 |
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| access_status_str | Open Access |
| author | Walaza, Sandisile |
| author2 | Zuidgeest, Marcus |
| author_browse | Walaza, Sandisile Zuidgeest, Marcus |
| author_facet | Zuidgeest, Marcus Walaza, Sandisile |
| author_sort | Walaza, Sandisile |
| collection | Thesis |
| description | Public transport has become increasingly important in developing nations, playing a pivotal role as the primary mode of transportation for economic, social, and cultural endeavours for numerous individuals. While there has been extensive research on the technical aspects of public transport, the customer's perspective has received limited attention. Passenger's perception of the individual characteristics of the service plays a crucial role in evaluating service quality. Therefore, it is important to identify the factors that significantly influence the overall assessment of the service and those that have minimal impact. Understanding the order and magnitude of the importance of these external factors is of great importance to service providers when wanting to improve user experiences, for planning purposes, for marketing purposes as well as for fare setting. Considering this, the primary focus of this research is to provide empirical evidence on the existence of a hierarchy in transportation needs. Such evidence is provided in this research by investigating the existence of a user quality pyramid on public transport modes as claimed in literature. We do this for the City of Cape Town using the Best-Worst Scaling (BWS) method, which measures consumer priorities in a manner that is robust and transparent, by compelling respondents to make trade-offs among items. BWS is a survey technique of measuring individuals' priorities as it identifies the extremes in a given list as best as well as worst items and is used in other disciplines where prioritisation of items is required to guide decisions. In this study, 282 public transport users rank the best and the worst quality attributes in a given set of 14 quality attributes. The research findings indicate that travel time followed by affordability are the most important quality attributes in regional public transport modes. Equally, in- vehicle security followed by service transfers are the least important public transport quality attributes. We use this to construct and comment on the user quality pyramid. Index Terms Best-worst scaling, Public Transport, user quality perceptions and preferences, quality attributes |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/40176 |
| institution | University of Cape Town (South Africa) |
| language | Eng |
| last_indexed | 2026-06-10T12:33:21.255Z |
| license_str | Not specified — see source repository |
| provenance_str_mv | Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| publishDateRange | 2024 |
| publishDateSort | 2024 |
| publisher | Department of Civil Engineering |
| publisherStr | Department of Civil Engineering |
| record_format | dspace |
| source_str | UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| spelling | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/40176 Public Transport Modes: Measuring user quality perceptions and preferences in Cape Town Walaza, Sandisile Zuidgeest, Marcus Engineering Public transport has become increasingly important in developing nations, playing a pivotal role as the primary mode of transportation for economic, social, and cultural endeavours for numerous individuals. While there has been extensive research on the technical aspects of public transport, the customer's perspective has received limited attention. Passenger's perception of the individual characteristics of the service plays a crucial role in evaluating service quality. Therefore, it is important to identify the factors that significantly influence the overall assessment of the service and those that have minimal impact. Understanding the order and magnitude of the importance of these external factors is of great importance to service providers when wanting to improve user experiences, for planning purposes, for marketing purposes as well as for fare setting. Considering this, the primary focus of this research is to provide empirical evidence on the existence of a hierarchy in transportation needs. Such evidence is provided in this research by investigating the existence of a user quality pyramid on public transport modes as claimed in literature. We do this for the City of Cape Town using the Best-Worst Scaling (BWS) method, which measures consumer priorities in a manner that is robust and transparent, by compelling respondents to make trade-offs among items. BWS is a survey technique of measuring individuals' priorities as it identifies the extremes in a given list as best as well as worst items and is used in other disciplines where prioritisation of items is required to guide decisions. In this study, 282 public transport users rank the best and the worst quality attributes in a given set of 14 quality attributes. The research findings indicate that travel time followed by affordability are the most important quality attributes in regional public transport modes. Equally, in- vehicle security followed by service transfers are the least important public transport quality attributes. We use this to construct and comment on the user quality pyramid. Index Terms Best-worst scaling, Public Transport, user quality perceptions and preferences, quality attributes 2024-07-02T10:10:00Z 2024-07-02T10:10:00Z 2023 2024-06-06T14:33:25Z Thesis / Dissertation Masters MSc http://hdl.handle.net/11427/40176 Eng application/pdf Department of Civil Engineering Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment |
| spellingShingle | Engineering Walaza, Sandisile Public Transport Modes: Measuring user quality perceptions and preferences in Cape Town |
| thesis_degree_str | Master's |
| title | Public Transport Modes: Measuring user quality perceptions and preferences in Cape Town |
| title_full | Public Transport Modes: Measuring user quality perceptions and preferences in Cape Town |
| title_fullStr | Public Transport Modes: Measuring user quality perceptions and preferences in Cape Town |
| title_full_unstemmed | Public Transport Modes: Measuring user quality perceptions and preferences in Cape Town |
| title_short | Public Transport Modes: Measuring user quality perceptions and preferences in Cape Town |
| title_sort | public transport modes measuring user quality perceptions and preferences in cape town |
| topic | Engineering |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/11427/40176 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT walazasandisile publictransportmodesmeasuringuserqualityperceptionsandpreferencesincapetown |