| Abstract: |
In order to determine the level of satisfaction of the public transport
services, the passengers jointly evaluate the various attributes that
represent the different aspects of the level of service. From a methodological
viewpoint this means finding the weighting that individuals use to evaluate
those attributes within what is considered as the level of global satisfaction
or utility. In this paper we obtain indicators that permit the aggregate
measurement of the quality of the public transport bus services on Gran
Canaria in Spain. The analysis focuses on obtaining the preferences using
designs of Stated Preferences (SP) that give the individual the choice between
the current service and a hypothetical service defined, from a combination of
the most relevant variables. With this information multinomial logit models
are estimated that permit us to obtain a linear representation of the utility
function parameters, from which a measure of the global quality of the service
is obtained. The results of the analysis demonstrate that passengers have
clearly different behaviour, depending on whether they are urban or interurban
users; this is especially relevant in their perception of certain attributes
such as frequency, and to some extent the willingness to pay relative to the
components of total travelling time. |