Abstract:
Public transport plays an important role in human society. Even more so in the context of
developing countries where a large share of trip makers are captive users of public
transport trying to gain access to economic activities, schools and other social and cultural
activities. User quality and user perceptions are essential indicators for service providers
to understand their service offering better, also in a context of captivity. One needs to
understand which external factors are essential and which ones are sufficient and the
extent to which they are. 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 user
experience and satisfaction. 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, a
total of 282 public transport users rank the best and the worst quality attributes in a given
set. 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 critique the user quality pyramid
