Service Quality of Public Buses in Dhaka City: A Women’s Perspective

Abstract

From the social and cultural perspective of Bangladesh, women’s involvement in economic activities outside the residence is increasing day by day. A large number of economically active women are working in Dhaka where they make a substantial part of their total daily trips on public buses. Nowadays, measuring the service quality of public buses from the perspective of female commuters is getting importance in print and electronic media because of their security issues in case of accessing public transport. This research presents a framework to portrait the prevailing scenario of service quality of public buses in Dhaka city experienced by its female commuters. The main objective of this study is to explore the perception of the women commuters by revealing their probable grounds of dissatisfaction by identifying various factors along with their interactions in affecting the service quality of public buses. The study expects to propose solutions to overcome the problems and social constraints faced by female commuters while using public buses. The focus group of this study is mainly the university going young female students and the female commuters involved in the present workforce to the city. This research is conducted integrating a qualitative approach with quantitative methods. The qualitative study is conducted through a semi-structured in-depth focus group discussion (FGD) involving around 50 female participants. The interviews are recorded and transcribed and the study applies text mining on transcribed data. Major complaints and compliments regarding existing service quality along with their underlying reasons, magnitudes, impacts, and consequences are extracted from text mining results. The participants’ perceptions are evaluated considering seven attributes – i) reliability, ii) comfort, iii) service, iv) responsiveness and empathy, v) safety and security, vi) affordability and vii) vehicle access. This guides in developing a service quality assessment framework customized from two well-known service quality models - SERVQUAL and RESCA. Based on that, a closed-ended questionnaire survey is conducted to evaluate individual trips where the respondents evaluated various aspects of a trip they have just completed by bus and rated the overall journey as ‘satisfactory’ or ‘unsatisfactory’. A total of 641 trips is evaluated by the respondents. In the quantitative approach, the Random Forest (RF) model is applied to the trip evaluation data to measure xii the importance of various factors along with their ranking. Then, a Classification and Regression Tree (CART) is developed to understand the dominances and interactions among factors that make the overall experience of public bus trip ‘satisfactory’ or ‘unsatisfactory’ to its female commuters. Analysis of the trip data reveals that around 67% of the respondents rate their overall trip experience to be unsatisfactory and only 33% of them are satisfied with the trip that they made with the public bus. Both the qualitative and quantitative analyses identify the boarding-alighting status and harassment issues as the most important variables which greatly influence the safety, security and comfort-related issues of female commuters. ‘Boarding alighting status’, ‘picking passengers (hurriedly/modestly)’, ‘female passenger harassment’, ‘noise status’, ‘harassment by the bus driver and/or helper’, ‘heat condition (inside temperature)’, ‘bad attitudes of male passenger’, ‘protestation against bad behavior’, ‘travel status (standing/seating/mixed)’, ‘waiting time for bus’ are identified as the top ten important variables from RF model. Finally, several suggestions, such as providing training to the bus staff, random inspection by law enforcement authorities, introducing more seats and buses exclusively for female passengers, etc. came from the respondents. Several policy recommendations are also proposed compiling the thoughts of the respondents and recommendations from the literature that are expected to arrest the attention of policymakers and assist them to re-plan the existing public transport policy in Dhaka city and cities alike.