Perceived Atmosphere of Public Transport and Customer’s Satisfaction: an Attitudinal Study

The understanding of the daily experience of the public transport users is aninteresting aspect to investigate. It is useful to the public transport companies toincrease the quality of their services. This paper aims at exploring howdistinctive atmospheres affect the users' judgment on the service quality of publictransport in two different cities, Torino and Teheran.To this end, a survey has been designed to investigate the attitudes among asample of students living in the two cities to understand if the different social andcultural contexts can influence their perception, considering that, despite thedifference in the urban systems, Tehran and Torino have comparable publictransport infrastructures. The survey provided the design of a questionnaire to beadministered to the sample, who also participated to a focus group. The data wereanalyzed using the SPSS for the statistical analysis and ATLAS.ti for the textualanalysis of the discussions. The results show some independent factors related tothe customers’ satisfaction of the public transport. The analysis of quantitativedata demonstrated a significant change in users’ attitude about travel time,comfort, crowding and safety and security of traveling. The qualitative analysisrevealed that the social status and the environmental conditions affect thecustomers’ judgment, which is called effective atmosphere. The Kelman’sprocess of opinion change (POC) and the Ajzen’s theory of planned behaviour(TPB) allow describing the statistical difference between the two groups. Thechange of judgment caused by affective atmosphere completes the mentionedtheory's description. The combination of the TPB theory and of the impact of theaffective atmosphere is a new approach to interpret and predict the customersatisfaction level.

Keywords:

Public Transport , Affective atmosphere , Satisfaction , Social Influence