Attitudes towards public transport under extended disruptions and massive-scale transit dysfunction: A Hong Kong case study

Disruptions to transport systems often significantly change travel behaviour. This is especially true when the disruption lasts over an extended period and is accompanied by the massive-scale dysfunction of transit operations. In addition, although attitude is critical for predicting travel behaviour, there is little documentation of changes in attitudes towards transit modes and the factors influencing such changes during a transit system disruption. Furthermore, few studies have investigated how social movements can exert a pronounced disrupting effect on a transit system. To fill these research gaps and provide policy recommendations for a more responsive contingency plan in response to future transit system disruptions, our study aims to investigate this issue based on the case of Hong Kong during the 2019 social movement. We collected a questionnaire survey representing the period from late June to early July 2020, a few months after the end of the protests. Using structural equation models, we have examined how people's attitudes towards different transit modes changed during the social movement. Our findings highlight that people's perception of the city's urban rail system – the Mass Transit Railway, which the government has a significant stake in and control over – worsened significantly during the transit disruption, but the effects were less pronounced for bus and mini-bus. In addition, attitudes towards the social movement were found to vary significantly across social groups, a finding linked to people's attitudes towards different transit modes. Importantly, our study reveals that people's views of social movements can significantly determine how they evaluate impacted and alternative transport modes during transit disruptions. These newly revealed attitudinal dimensions should be fully considered in predicting behavioural change and adjusting transit services under similar conditions.