Statistical Estimation of the Importance Customers Place on Specific Elements of Bus Rapid Transit

Bus rapid transit (BRT) is a rapidly growing national trend in the provision of public transportation. At present, with more than 150 new start rail projects currently in the Federal Transit Authority pipeline, a wide range of alternatives is necessary to fulfill the demand for cost-effective rapid public transportation. As a lower-cost, high-capacity mode of public transportation, BRT can serve as an option to help address the growing traffic congestion and mobility problems in both urban and non-urban areas. Careful documentation and analyses of BRT systems and the unique features of these projects will help determine the what are the most effective features offered by the BRT systems such the most successful service characteristics, level of transit demand, region size, and other amenities. This paper presents a statistical analysis of the data from two on-board customer surveys conducted in 2001 of the BRT systems in Miami and Orlando, Florida. Using data from the two on-board surveys, the simplest method for measuring the importance that customers place on specific BRT service characteristics is to calculate mean scores for each characteristic using some type of numeric scale (for example, a scale of 1 through 5, with 5 being the highest). While there are no real discernable drawbacks to this simple method, an alternate technique to measure the importance of each service attribute is to derive the importance of each attribute using STEPWISE regression. This statistical method estimates the importance of each attribute to overall customer satisfaction. The results indicate that customers place a high value on the BRT service characteristics frequency of service, comfort, travel time, and reliability of service.