Commuters' Perceptions on Service Quality of Bus Rapid Transit Systems: Evidence from the Cities of Ahmedabad, Surat and Rajkot in India

Abstract

Urban public transport is gaining significant importance in today's world. This is evident from the fact that it has found its place in United Nations Development Programme's Sustainable Development Goals in the eleventh goal pertaining to 'Sustainable cities and communities'. The competitiveness of the cities largely depends on the robustness of their transport systems. In India there has been huge spending on the public transport projects in cities across the country. Ahmedabad, Surat and Rajkot from Gujarat, India have been the beneficiaries of these investments. Capturing the demand side quality of services is very important for such projects and hence the attempt has been made to study whether the commuters' perceptions on quality of services of Bus Rapid Transit systems vary across different demographic cohorts. There are nine demographic cohorts used for the study. SERVPERF model has been adopted to study the performance of Bus Rapid Transit systems in the said citied. The performance is evaluated over the six factors namely; tangibles, empathy, cleanliness, reliability, safety and affordability. It has been found that Surat tops among the three cities followed by Rajkot and Ahmedabad on various service quality factors. Also commuters' perception towards quality of service dimensions vary across demographic cohorts like gender, time of travel, education, employment status, length of patronization and purpose of trip.