Structural Equation Modelling for Analysing Passengers’ Perceptions about Railway Services

By Laura Eboli, Gabriella Mazzulla. 2012

161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this work a tool for analysing passengers’ perceptions in terms of satisfaction with transit services is proposed. Specifically, a structural equation model is formulated to explore the impact of the relationship between global customer satisfaction and service quality attributes, such as safety, cleanliness, main and additional services, information, and personnel. We analyse the services offered by rail operators in the Northern Italy; specifically, 32 regional lines and 9 suburban lines connecting different towns of the hinterland of the city of Milan, and 2 express lines connecting Milan with the Malpensa airport are analysed. To calibrate the model, data collected in a survey addressed to a sample of more than 16,000 passengers are used. The survey was conducted in June 2011. The proposed model can be useful both to transport agencies and planners to analyze the correlation between service quality attributes and identify the most convenient attributes for improving the supplied service. The main findings are that service characteristics like punctuality, regularity and frequency of runs, and cleanliness have the highest positive effect on service quality. While also comfort and information have a notable positive effect, personnel and safety have a not very considerable effect.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/850f8452b1f32d47f7e498a81681d36ec1d36ea2

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In Economics and Econometrics

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Transportation

Citations in the corpus

Enjoying loyalty: The relationship between service quality, customer satisfaction, and behavioral intentions in public transit (2016, background): “More recently, Eboli and Mazzulla (2014) analyzed how passengers of regional rail lines in Northern Italy perceive satisfaction with service quality.”
Quality of Service in Public Transport Based on Customer Satisfaction Surveys: A Review and Assessment of Methodological Approaches (2015, methodology): “In some cases, they are asked to rate each attribute in terms of both perceptions and expectations (e.g., Lin, Lee, and Jen 2008; Sultan and Simpson 2000); or to rate global service, in terms of both perceptions and expectations (Eboli and Mazzulla 2012b).”
Modelling user perception of bus transit quality considering user and service heterogeneity (2014, background): “Factorial analysis and more complex structures allow the numerical treatment of data by estimating latent variables (Eboli and Mazzulla 2007, 2012b).”