User's Satisfaction with Public Transport Operations in Ibadan, Nigeria

Public transport is an important service that people patronize to fulfill their travel needs. One of the most important issues about this service is passengers' satisfaction. The users of service are the most suitable judges to evaluate service quality. The aim of this study was to evaluate passengers' satisfaction with service quality attributes of public bus transport services in Ibadan, Nigeria using private transit operators as the case study. This study obtained information randomly from 120 transit users at dugbe, sango, challenge and gate bus terminals using a self-rated questionnaire. The result of the ranked service quality attributes indicates that users were satisfied with only six attributes of public bus transport services in Ibadan. The principal component analysis found four underlying factors: comfort, service reliability, security and accessibility that influence users' satisfaction with bus services in the city. The four factors explained 57.03 percent of the total variance of principal component analysis. The regression coefficients showed that accessibility (β=0.620), service reliability (β=0.341), security (β=0.106) and comfort (β=0.061) contribute to users' satisfaction of public transport bus service in the city in that order of importance. This study therefore concludes that the quality of service provided by public bus transport operators influence users satisfaction. Hence, transit operator's needs to improve their service quality especially comfort, reliability, security and accessibility to increase users satisfaction and patronage.