Determinants of Users’ Perception of Fixed Route Paratransit Service Quality

Fixed route paratransit complements transit service as a feeder mode. These services are offered by private operators without any government subsidy and are loosely controlled via paratransit unions in many countries such as India. Poor service quality of these modes creates barriers in the provision of an integrated transit experience. Thus, there is a need for formal regulatory policies or advisory guidelines to improve their service quality by taking into consideration users’ perception. These policies and guidelines can be developed through determining the Level of Service (LOS) scales for different service quality attributes and then determining their priority so that their shortcomings can be addressed. In this research, we extend our earlier work on LOS scale development to determine the priority of various service attributes and their implications in policy formulations for fixed route paratransit services in Kolkata, India. Further, both stated and derived importance techniques are utilised to ensure the inclusion of service aspects that could be adopted in future. RIDIT analysis is applied to estimate the level of importance of attributes from stated importance data and derived importance is determined using the partial log-likelihood (PLL) technique. Unlike earlier studies, this research highlights that improvement of paratransit service operations can be only achieved through the integrated effort of operators, union authorities, regulatory authorities and city officials.