An indicator for measuring the perceived quality of local public transport: relationship with use and satisfaction with the ticket price

The use of public transport is linked to many aspects of city life and its inhabitants and, as in a spider’s web, each strand is part of a system and exists only if there is a system as a whole. In Italy it has been long discussed to encourage the use of local public transport (LPT) through improvements to LPT quality – after historically supporting it with the low price allowed by heavy subsidies – and the design of urban mobility as a whole has been neglected, missing the goal of increasing the number of passengers. This paper intends to build an Index of perceived quality of LPT and investigate its relations with the use and satisfaction with ticket price in the twenty Italian Regions. The study also presents an analysis of the subsisting correlations between the Index of perceived quality, the use of LPT and satisfaction with the price paid for the service provided by public transport companies. This work takes into account both objective and subjective aspects of the service, through user perceptions (customer-based approach), because the assessment of the quality of the service through the user’s eyes is considered essential for the implementation of any strategy aimed at increasing or consolidating the use of LPT. In order to measure the quality perceived by users recourse is made to an index constructed on the basis of selected variables from the latest Istat Multi-purpose Survey “Aspects of daily life”. 1 The index is obtained through the aggregation of individual indicators and by comparing the methodology known in the literature as the Borda index and factor analysis. The results conirm a low correlation between LPT quality and its utilization, although Italian LPT policies seem to neglect this evidence. The research shows : (i) a low correlation between the perceived quality of LPT and its utilization ; (ii) the user satisfaction for the ticket price is however quite varied at the national level and does not seem to respond to particular spatial criteria (North/South) or to size ; (iii) the improve of the performance of LPT by improving LPT alone is an inefective endeavour.