Understanding the effects of economic crisis on public transport users’ satisfaction and demand

How urban density, network topology and socio-economy influence public transport ridership: Empirical evidence from 48 European metropolitan areas

Route effect on the perception of public transport services quality

This paper continues the research effort that the authors begun in 2008 on the quality factors that affect adoption of public transportation and retention of its users. The objective of this paper is to explore the impacts of the deep, 7-year economic crisis, on the perceptions of public transport users, with bus as their main transport mode, about service quality. Data from three user-satisfaction surveys that were conducted in Athens in 2008 (pre-crisis), 2013 (mid-crisis) and 2017 (deep-crisis) are used for the analysis. Mann Whitney/Wilcoxon test is applied for the distribution comparison of the responses between the pairs of consecutive years (2008–2013 and 2013–2017), in order to measure the change in users’ preferences. Ordered logit models are developed for the user satisfaction and shift to public transportation after the beginning of the economic crisis. The results of the analysis indicate that the satisfaction about quality attributes, such as service frequency, conditions at the stations and information provision, are important contributors of the total satisfaction, verifying the results of Tyrinopoulos and Antoniou (2008) and Efthymiou et al. (2014), but their impact varies over time. Despite the general decrease of commuting activities due to increase of unemployment, the shift to public transportation has increased. More specifically, demographic characteristics, such as age, occupation and gender, as well as qualitative factors, such as overall quality of service, service production, transfer quality, ticket services and environmental consciousness, have affected the decision of people to shift to and from public transportation.

Factors affecting bus users’ satisfaction in times of economic crisis

An econometric model is presented that identifies the main variables explaining evasion of fare payment on a public transport system. The model uses a cointegration approach. The model parameters are estimated using data from the Santiago (Chile) bus system, where evasion has been measured at approximately 28%. The main results of the model are that (i) a 10% increase in the fare raises evasion by 2 percentage points and (ii) a 10% increase in inspections lowers evasion by 0.8 percentage points. An increase in unemployment, the third explanatory variable in the model, tends to induce a decrease in evasion, and vice versa. This counterintuitive finding may be explained by the fact that those most vulnerable to job loss, and more likely to evade than the average user due to economic necessity, tend to reduce their use of the bus system when unemployment rises and increase it when unemployment falls. Our results suggest a revision of the evasion control policy in Santiago to improve its effectiveness, and to link inspection efforts to fare increases or to decreases in unemployment.

Cesar Canales

Papers

Public transport demand elasticities during the recessionary phases of economic cycles