Abstract
Passengers form the most important stake-holding body in public transit services. This study deals with the complexity of assessing transit service quality by identifying attributes affecting passenger’s satisfaction. An innovative questionnaire was designed by taking passengers’ demographic information and a wide spectrum of attributes related to operating conditions of two bus rapid transit systems (BRTS), i.e., Janmarg (Ahmedabad city) and Sitilink (Surat city) in the state of Gujarat. Total 23 variables are extracted using factor analysis with a Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) value of 0.63 to conclude that the sample size is adequate enough for the model. These variables are grouped into six principal components and changed over to fuzzy sets with three membership functions each to map the fuzziness and ambiguity in passengers’ perception. The complications of generating 36 = 729 number of fuzzy rules are solved by introducing a hierarchical fuzzy inference system (FIS) with two lower-level FIS and one higher-level FIS. The first lower FIS consists of “accessibility,” “service provisions,” and “reliability” as fuzzy input variables to get “availability” as an output variable. The second lower FIS contains “safety and security,” “fare,” and “comfort” as input parameters to produce “comfort and convenience” as an output variable. The resulting fuzzy values are used in higher-level FIS and defuzzified to evaluate the satisfaction level of passengers by max-min composition technique. This method will help in improving existing transit facilities and devising strategies for ensuring sustainability.
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Jena, S., Dholawala, H., Panda, M., Bhuyan, P.K. (2020). Assessment of Induced Fuzziness in Passenger’s Perspective of Transit Service Quality: A Sustainable Approach for Indian Transit Scenario. In: Mathew, T., Joshi, G., Velaga, N., Arkatkar, S. (eds) Transportation Research . Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering, vol 45. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9042-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9042-6_5
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