A Theoretical And Empirical Study On The Evaluation Of Railway Passenger Satisfaction

With the rapid development of the economic society, people’s choices of travel behaviors are increasingly diversified, leading to the fierce competition between carriers. As carriers survive on passengers, they try such measures as cutting fares, improving service environment and increasing added value to attract more passengers and improve passenger satisfaction, so as to gain competitive edges. Railway is a major lifeblood of the national economy and a popular transportation with the advantage of particular resource-conserving, environmental-friendly, heavy load, high speed and all-weather mode. Passenger transportation is a vital part of railway transportation. To serve the people, railway service quality and passenger satisfaction must be improved. Studying the theories and evaluation methods regarding railway passenger satisfaction is significant for maintaining the sustainable competitiveness of railway carriers.This paper reviews the historical origin of customer satisfaction studies, explores the connotation and characteristics of railway passenger satisfaction, applies service quality and passenger satisfaction theories to the study of railway passenger satisfaction and establishes an index system for railway passenger satisfaction evaluation. More specifically, a conceptual model of railway passenger satisfaction index is established using the research findings of customer satisfaction index models, the correlations between the structure variables in the model are discussed, and perceived quality is broken down into 5 hidden variables, namely, standardized services, operation order, travel safety, service environment and special services, based on the specific characteristics of railway passenger transportation. To facilitate the calculation of railway passenger satisfaction, the established index system is quantified and the established conceptual model of railway passenger satisfaction is expressed mathematically. To get the estimated values of satisfaction, the method of weighting for the passenger satisfaction index is studied, the advantages of the objective weighting method are pointed out, and the weights of indices are obtained. In addition, the internal consistency of the index system is tested using reliability and validity tests. Based on the 17 pairs of trains heading for Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou under Wuhan Railway Bureau, an empirical study on railway passenger satisfaction index model is carried out, thus obtaining the correlation coefficients between model variables, and the goodness of fit of the established model is tested to be high using communality and other indices.