Journal of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies, Vol.13, 2019
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Journal of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies, Vol.13, 2019 Investigating Satisfaction and Its Determinants of BRT-Lite Services in Indonesian Cities Martina Cecilia ADRIANA*a, Muhamad RIZKIb, Tri Basuki JOEWONOc aPT.Mitra Pembangunan Jaya, Tangerang Selatan, 15413, Indonesia aE-mail: [email protected] bDepartment of Civil Engineering, Parahyangan Catholic University, Bandung 40117, Indonesia* bE-mail: [email protected] cDepartment of Civil Engineering, Parahyangan Catholic University, Bandung 40117, Indonesia cE-mail: [email protected] Abstract: Passenger satisfaction significantly affects behaviour towards public transport. With emerging BRT-Lite development in Indonesia, satisfaction of the services reflects the quality and performance to meet the passengers need. This paper investigates passenger satisfaction level of four BRT-lite in Indonesian cities, consists of shelter and bus service attributes, users personal and travel characteristics. Passenger satisfaction for key service attributes of bus and shelter was assessed using Customer Satisfaction Index and Ordinal Logistic Regression. The results of this study found that passenger in Bali, Surakarta, and Bandung tend to rate high satisfaction level for most attributes, whereas less satisfaction is found in Bogor. Specific attributes do have significant influence on satisfaction level which also causing the negative results in Bogor. Interesting finding found in this paper is that BRT- Lite which has the lowest satisfaction rate resulting in possibility to reduce the sustainability of the BRT operation. Keywords: Passenger Satisfaction, Public Transport, Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction Index, BRT-Lite 1. INTRODUCTION Rapid urbanization and high motorization in the last decade in Indonesia cities lead to many urban problems such as severe traffic congestion, air pollution, greenhouse gasses emission, and traffic accidents. Public transportation (PT) provides the most promising and direct solution to tackling the issues without restraining economic growth. PT has been continuously expanded in developed and developing countries to provide sustainable and inclusive service for people’s mobility needs. From past decades, Indonesian government has planned several programmes for public transport improvement and development. However, due to the fiscal limitation, road-based PT (i.e. BRT and regular bus services) still becomes a priority choice for city development. In particular, since BRT have success records in some countries, Indonesian government emphasize BRT-lite (ITDP, 2007) for many Indonesian cities. Established in 2000, Transmilenio is the first BRT system in the world which provide rail-system transport into high-quality bus system infrastructure (Wienstock, 2016). Adopting the performance and amenity of rail-transit system, BRT provides high capacity and faster *Corresponding author 1447 Journal of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies, Vol.13, 2019 speed yet at a relatively lower cost. Since its first introduction, BRT system has quickly known and spread to all over the world, particularly to developing countries like Indonesia. While Bogota Transmilenio had the highest BRT system, Indonesia prefers to apply BRT-lite or semi-featured BRT to cities, except for Jakarta. Adopting some BRT features, commonly BRT-lite has no physically segregated lane and have kerb-side boarding platform. However, the degree of BRT-lite in Indonesian cities is diverse that resulting in distinct service deliverables. For instance, Perusahaan Daerah Jasa Transportasi (PDJT), as a BRT-Lite local enterprise in Bogor tend to provide medium bus while in Bandung the bus operators prefer the big bus (Prayudyanto et. al., 2016a). Not only the bus, shelter quality and its accessibility also vary between cities. Further, scholars acknowledge that the service quality will influence the satisfaction of passenger and consequently influence travel behavior indirectly including mode choice (Joewono and Kubota, 2007; LaBarbera and Mazursky, 1983;Lai and Chen, 2011; Nathanail, 2008; Sánchez-Pérez et al., 2007; White, 2009) Customer satisfaction is strongly correlated with service quality. Customer satisfaction is defined as the measurement of services performance through the various attributes and/or overall services related to customer needs (Hill et al., 2003 and Tanese et al, 2003). Further, scholars have translated customer satisfaction into evaluation measurement in various method (Eboli and Mazzula, 2009b & Nathanail, 2008), which provide valuable information from passenger point of view. Study by Coffel (1995) found that passenger satisfaction of public transport has significant influence on passenger decision to use it as a primary transport mode. Conversely, declining satisfaction level can result in discontinuing of public transport use. Lai and Chen (2011) underlined that passenger behavioural intention significantly relies on their satisfaction of specific attributes such as vehicle safety, facility cleanliness, and complaint handling. White (2009) also added other services that can influence behaviour such as vehicle comfort, quality of information, and staff attitudes towards passenger. Based on past studies above, understanding the passenger satisfaction impact on their behaviour is important to provide, maintain, and improve public transit services. Further, passenger behaviour generated by their satisfaction using public transit is a prime determinant of long-term financial performance (Lai and Chen, 2011) and considered as a major source of competitive advantage (Lam et al., 2004). In an effort to make public transport more attractive, the evaluation of satisfaction will benefit for determining the priority of improvement. Literatures have identified important attributes, which influence passenger satisfaction level on public transport in general, however, rare study is found specifically on BRT-lite. One example of the limited studies is Joewono et al. (2017). Therefore, with various degree of BRT-lite implementation in Indonesia, this study aims to compare passenger satisfaction and identify the significant attributes that affecting it. With various degree of BRT-Lite in Indonesia, comparison on BRT-Lite level is relevant to be studied. Comparison of BRT-Lite service will give substantial information for evaluation of service as well as recommendation for policy development. According to that, this paper investigates satisfaction level on passenger for its services in four BRT-lite cases in Indonesian cities: (1) Bali, (2) Bandung, (3) Bogor, and (4) Surakarta. The reason for selecting these cities is to represent various socio-demography and geographical characteristics as well as their BRT-Lite service characteristics. All of them are big cities, on which Bali, Bandung, Surakarta are the centre of agglomeration area while Bogor is a satellite city of Jakarta Megapolitan. Based on past studies above, hypothesis of this study is the quality of infrastructure and service of BRT-Lite influence passengers satisfaction. Further, drivers that influence overall satisfaction will be examined from service attributes, passenger characteristic, and travel characteristic. The findings of this study may provide useful information to bus operator and policymaker to 1448 Journal of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies, Vol.13, 2019 develop their business and strategic plan. In the following sections, previous studies on BRT implementation in Indonesia and satisfaction evaluation are reviewed. The data collection and data analysis method will be described in section 3. Section 4 will provide the results of satisfaction analysis. The last section will be followed by discussion and conclusion. 2. BRT SYSTEM AND QUALITY 2.1 BRT in Indonesian Cities BRT was firstly introduced in 2004 through Trans Jakarta full-featured system. The implementation vastly spread and becomes a crucial step and triggerfor other cities to improve their public transport. Until 2018, there are 17 cities in total have implemented BRT system, 16 are BRT-lite and only one full-featured BRT system.All the BRT-Lite tend to have numbers of common features. According to the physical services, BRT-lite offers a higher standard of comfort from the previous city bus. No priority is given to the bus, on which the lane is mixed with the current traffic. All of the stations are on the kerb-side and high- platform, where buses are only permitted to stop. All utilized flat-fare with free transfers. Various structures of operator are found in cities, however, PT. Damri as a state-owned enterprise also provides services in several Indonesian cities. Some of the cities also have more than one operator consortium which involving private company. In order to operate, generally, government provide subsidies in various form as a payment model for instance by buy the service payment and/or operational subsidies. Several local governments also provide the buses for BRT operation at no cost. Further, in 2015, Central Government also supporting the bus provision to cities in Indonesia to support BRT-Lite implementation at the local level. Table 1. Operated BRT in Indonesia Cities No City BRT Name Operation Year BRT Type 1 DKI Jakarta Trans Jakarta 2004 Full-featured system 2 Batam Trans Batam 2005 Semi-featured system 3 Bogor Trans Pakuan 2007 Semi-featured system 4 Yogyakarta Trans Jogja 2008 Semi-featured system 5 Bandung Trans Metro Bandung 2009 Semi-featured system 6