Application of cart for analysing service quality of intercity bus service in Bangladesh

Abstract

It has been shown that intercity bus services are superior to competing modes in terms of external costs, greenhouse gas emissions and road safety. However, unlike railway and airline transportation services, adequate studies have not been carried out regarding evaluation of service quality improvements in intercity bus service industry in Bangladesh or other parts of the world. Due to air pollution, sweltering heat, traffic congestion and poor roadway condition, inter-city passengers with higher purchasing powers in Bangladesh are preferring to travel by air-conditioned luxury buses for a comfortable ride. Hence intercity bus companies are increasing their fleet size of luxurious air-conditioned buses. Bus companies must monitor performance and improve service quality to attract new passengers and boost ridership. In this study, the Classification and Regression Trees (CART) technique was applied for evaluation of luxury intercity bus service in Bangladesh. A custom-made questionnaire was prepared for collecting data regarding passengers’ perception of service quality of intercity luxury bus service in Bangladesh through face-to-face interviews with 999 passengers in bus counters located in different areas of Dhaka city. The first section of the survey questionnaire collected information regarding socio economic, travel habits of passengers and the bus service. The second and third section of the survey questionnaire required passengers to express their perception of performance regarding 26 service quality attributes on a 5-point Likert scale of 1-5 (1=Very Low Quality and 5=Very High Quality) and identify three most important service quality attributes from the 26 service quality attributes. Finally, passengers were asked to rate overall bus service quality on a scale of 1-5. The collected data of 999 passengers was filtered for anomalies and finally data of 859 passengers were used for developing the CART models. CART models were developed for the overall market as well as for 5 different market segments based on the days of the week passengers traveled and the duration of trips undertaken by passengers. In each case, the available dataset was divided into a training and testing set. The training sample (usually 70% of the whole sample) was used to develop a service quality evaluation model using CART. At least 1% of the sample was represented at each node. All the developed CART models demonstrated accuracies of 68.5 % to 73.5 % in categorization of the dependent variable. The significant service quality attributes were then compared with empirical observations obtained from the questionnaire survey. It was revealed that for passengers of intercity luxury bus service, service quality attributes related to comfort, hospitality, hygiene standards and ticketing facilities were important. Since passengers were paying higher fares for boarding luxury buses during intercity trips their decision making processes are influenced by service quality attributes like ‘riding quality’, ‘seat space’, ‘onboard courtesy’, ‘seat comfort’, ‘grievance redressal management’, ‘fare service ratio’. Due to the effect of the COVID-19, passengers were more concerned about service quality attributes like ‘neat and clean appearance of employees’, ‘maintenance of health safety protocols’, ‘quality of online ticketing’, ‘convenience of ticketing and reservation’. In addition, it has been seen that some service quality attributes like `punctuality’ and `frequency’ are important regardless of the transportation mode under consideration. Thus in order to attract new passengers and create a group of loyal passengers, transport managers need to render luxury intercity bus transportation service with more modernized, comfortable buses and improve ticketing facilities. They also need to invest in human resource development since passengers have shown service quality attributes like ‘neat and clean appearance of employees’ and ‘onboard courtesy’ influence their decision making process. It is also necessary for transport managers to strictly maintain hygiene standards and ensure observance of health safety protocols in all vehicles for amelioration of overall bus service quality.