دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی یک روش جایگزین برای ارزیابی کیفیت خدمات تاکسی های شهری - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes an alternative methodology to evaluate the service quality of urban taxis and develops a level-of-service (LOS) standard for taxi customers to monitor performance. A customer satisfaction survey was conducted from January to March 2013 in Hong Kong, with the respondents invited to give specific satisfaction ratings for ten service aspects individually and a global satisfaction rating for the overall taxi service quality, as well as to rank the important aspects that influence the given global rating. The ten service aspects related to the amount of time consumed when taking taxis, services and facilities provided for finding taxis, internal environments of taxis, and personal services provided by taxi drivers. An enhanced linear regression model was developed to identify the priority areas for improvement of urban taxi service quality. Based on the numerical score of overall taxi service quality, a six-level LOS standard, similar to academic grading, is introduced accordingly to improve the general public's understanding of the current service level. This paper discusses the potential policy implications to enhance the taxi service quality in Hong Kong, which can be applied to other metropolitan cities that provide similar urban taxi services.

Conclusion

This paper proposes an alternative methodology to review the service quality of urban taxis and develops an LOS standard for taxi customers. A customer satisfaction survey was conducted to interview 1008 respondents in Hong Kong. The respondents were either taxi customers at taxi stands or pedestrians on streets who had taken taxis recently in the past three months. The interviewees were invited to provide satisfaction scores for ten selected service aspects and the score for the overall service performance, as well as to rank the important aspects. We develop an enhanced linear regression model to implicitly derive the importance of each of the service aspects to influence the overall service performance. The findings of the importance-satisfaction analysis suggest how service quality improvements should be prioritized. The highest priority should be given to improving the difficulty of hailing taxis on streets, waiting time required for a taxi, the attitude of taxi drivers, and the professionalism of taxi drivers. We further propose a six-level LOS standard for urban taxi customers. We determine this standard based on the numerical score estimated from the enhanced linear regression model, suggest an LOS threshold scheme for converting the LOS score to a letter grade. For the policy implications to enhance the taxi service quality, it is suggested to take appropriate enforcement actions against hire refusal, allow taxi picking up and dropping off at restricted zones when the impact to the local traffic is minimal, introduce a peak hour surcharge to suppress passenger demand for a shorter waiting time, encourage the taxi trade proactively improving the quality of taxi services, and explore the possibility of providing luxury taxi services. A follow-up study is recommended to incorporate the LOS threshold scheme with other customer waiting time and taxi travel time prediction models to determine the appropriate taxi fleet size for offering reasonable service quality to taxi customers.