Style versus Service? An Analysis of User Perceptions of Transit Stops and Stations

Transit travelers expend a great deal of time and energy on out-of-vehicle walking and waiting, which significantly affects their perceived burdens of travel. Accordingly, this article is concerned with ways to reduce the perceived burdens of out-of-vehicle time spent walking, waiting, and transferring to improve users’ experience at transit stops and stations. We surveyed 749 transit users at 12 transit stops and stations around metropolitan Los Angeles and found that the most important determinant of user satisfaction with a transit stop or station has little to do with the physical characteristics of the facility; instead, frequent, reliable service in an environment of personal safety matters most to riders. In other words, most transit users would prefer short, predictable waits for buses and trains in a safe, if simple or even dreary, environment over long waits for late-running vehicles in even the most elaborate and attractive transit station, especially if they fear for their safety. Introduction Travel by public transit involves much more than moving about on buses and trains. A typical door-to-door trip entails walking from one’s origin to a bus stop or train station, waiting for the vehicle to arrive, boarding the vehicle, traveling in the vehicle, alighting from the vehicle, and then walking to one’s final destination. Journal of Public Transportation, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2010 40 In many cases, the trip involves transfers; travelers alight from one transit vehicle, move to a new stop or platform, wait for another transit vehicle, and board that vehicle. Transit travelers expend a great deal of time and energy on this out-ofvehicle walking and waiting, which plays greatly into their perceived burden of transit travel. Despite the importance of out-of-vehicle transit travel, the in-vehicle travel experience has tended to garner the lion’s share of attention from transit managers and researchers. As cities have grown more dispersed and auto-oriented, the out-of-vehicle time share of transit trips has increased. In an effort to accommodate increasingly dispersed patterns of trip-making, many transit systems in U.S. metropolitan areas now require transit users to make frequent transfers among lines, modes, and operators. In metropolitan areas with large transit systems, transit stops and stations are integral parts of the transit network, playing an important role in connecting multiple transportation modes and systems. The effectiveness of these connections governs waiting and walking times at transit stops and stations, and, in turn, travelers’ choices regarding whether or not to take a particular transit trip. Given the effect of travel time on travel choices, good connectivity at transit stops and stations is critical to overall transportation network effectiveness. What are the best ways to reduce these out-of-vehicle travel burdens and improve transit users’ experience at stops, stations, and transfer facilities? Are some approaches to improving the interconnectivity among transit lines, modes, and systems more cost-effective than others? Can out-of-vehicle travel improvements be made in a stand-alone fashion, or are they more effectively implemented in concert with other complementary actions? To address these questions, we devised a framework to relate transit stop and station attributes to travelers’ outof-vehicle burdens based on travel behavior research. Guided by this framework, we developed a methodology, which consists of Importance-Satisfaction analyses and ordered logistic regression models, to examine transit users’ perceptions of services and the built environment at stops and stations. We applied this methodology to a survey of 749 transit users at stops and stations around metropolitan Los Angeles and identified the priorities that users place on means to improve their travel experience. In sum, we found that transit users tend to care more about personal safety and frequent, reliable service than the physical conditions of transit stops and stations. In other words, given a choice between benches, shelters, and off-street stations,