Satisfaction with crowding in public transport

Customer Satisfaction Surveys conducted among public transport passengers over 15 years in Stockholm show that the satisfaction with crowding has been and is low. Surprisingly, however, crowding does not seem to be important for the passengers’ total satisfaction with the public transport service, not even for passengers on the most highly crowded bus services in central Stockholm. A possible reason is that crowding is not perceived as part of the service delivered by the public transport provider. Using less aggregated data than previous studies we also find that the performance of the attributes crowding, reliability and frequency influences satisfaction with these attributes. Moreover, a general result is that when comparing different bus lines and public transport modes, the satisfaction with an attribute is influenced by the performance of this attribute, while the importance level is much more stable across bus lines and public transport modes. There is also a trend increase in the satisfaction with many attributes (but not for crowding), while the importance is more stable over time.