Students’ Views on Public Transport: Satisfaction and Emission

Abstract

Overall satisfaction is an emotional response to a perceived discrepancy between expectations and perceptions. Overall satisfaction is more of a holistic affective construct after a service delivery experience, while transaction-specific satisfaction refers to attribute-based cognitive evaluation of service encounters. The authors investigated which particular attributes of public transport service drive satisfaction of customers, contributing to public transport becoming more sustainable. The questionnaire used in this research was constructed based on Benchmarking in European Service of Public Transport (BEST). The respondents belonged to the group of younger users of public transport services. Correlation analysis, factor analysis, and regression analysis were used in data processing and interpretation. Results obtained from the research show that young people emphasize the importance of on-line information, comfort, and prices of the public transportation. This paper not only provides insight into expectations of public transport users, but also investigated the potential decrease in CO2 and PM emissions when private vehicles are substituted with the public transport.