Evaluation of Effective Factors on Service Quality of Urban Bus

Improvement of public transportation systems through attention to service quality of these systems is important in order to increase the use of these systems. Various quantitative and qualitative attributes of travel are known effective on service quality of public transport systems. The investigated attributes in this research, with reference to regular bus system of the city of Tehran, are: in-vehicle time, fare, crowding and headway. For this purpose, the stated preference data of the respondents who travel to work by regular bus, collected. The survey was conducted during the last month of spring 2014 and 360 questionnaires were completed. Stated preference scenarios relating to aforementioned attributes were analyzed using multinomial logit models. Model results showed that while all the attributes have significant effect on the utility of bus, crowding is more important than the other attributes. In the other hand, similar to findings at developing countries, headway is much less important than the others. Furthermore, willingness to pay (WTP) values for improvement of investigated attributes were calculated and hourly value of time for commuters, was estimated 19,380 rials.