The key role of quality assessment in public transport policy

This paper reviews assessment methods on transit quality, their application in stating the relationship with the demand for a certain service, and briefly the consequences in terms of transport policy of
the process of transit quality assessment.
This is discussed outside the context of the more familiar “predict and provide”method to an integrated transport policy, as the interdependency of quality and demand for a public transport service is generally hard to estimate, due either to the presence of a number of different significant criteria for quality assessment or to a quite strong dependency from subjective impressions of the customers.
Shortcomings are also connected with the presence of a number of intangibles.
All these causes make hard to distinguish sufficiently between those factors that are important for customers’ quality evaluation, and
those that are not.
The paper suggests a step-by step approach based on the joint use of customer satisfaction surveys and transit performance measurement techniques for determining what specific criteria really matter to customers, and highlights the importance of understanding more about passengers actual journey quality for an informed judgement on the impact of future schemes as a hint for policy makers.