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Investigating the role of preference variation in the perceptions of railway passengers in Great Britain

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posted on 2023-06-01, 12:30 authored by Fredrik Monsuur, Marcus EnochMarcus Enoch, Mohammed Quddus, Stuart Meek

This study explores the factors associated with passenger satisfaction on the UK railways. To uncover taste variation, the data was segmented into three homogeneous groups of passengers through a latent class ordered logit model, whereby the class allocation was based on observed personal and trip characteristics. The findings suggest that there is significant variation in the impact of service attributes on overall satisfaction across the segments, ‘class a’, ‘class b’ and ‘class c’. Class a (15% of the sample) consists of moderately dissatisfied to highly dissatisfied passengers, for whom ‘punctuality/reliability’ is most impactful on overall satisfaction. Respondents in this class are much more likely to experience adverse service conditions such as delays or crowding conditions. Class b (32% of the sample) consists of passenger who are quite critical and moderately satisfied, for whom ‘hedonic’ factors such as ‘upkeep and repair of the train’ and ‘seat comfort’ were most impactful. Finally, class c (53% of the sample) consists of passengers that are generally satisfied, and for whom the ‘value for money of the ticket price’ is most impactful on overall satisfaction. Interestingly, for both ‘class b’ and ‘class c’, ‘punctuality/reliability’ plays a more limited role in determining overall satisfaction compared to ‘class a’. This suggests that the role of ‘punctuality/reliability’ in determining overall satisfaction is more complex than presented in the literature thus far. Finally, unobserved taste variation plays an important role in the model, as the class allocation is not always easily linked to observed groups in the data. This paper thus highlights the importance of accounting for unobserved and systematic sources of heterogeneity in the data and could provide useful insights for analysts, policy makers and practitioners, to provide more targeted strategies to improve passenger satisfaction.

Funding

DTP - Loughborough University

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

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History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

Transportation

Publisher

Springer

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Acceptance date

2023-05-13

Publication date

2023-06-01

Copyright date

2023

ISSN

0049-4488

eISSN

1572-9435

Language

  • en

Depositor

Prof Marcus Enoch. Deposit date: 30 May 2023

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