How to improve public transport usage in a medium-sized city: key factors for a successful bus system

In recent years, the promotion and use of public transport (PT) has become key to overcoming the negative impacts of mobility, such as traffic congestion, high pollution (GHG), and traffic accidents. Improving users’ satisfaction and increasing the attractiveness of buses play an essential role in increasing PT patronage. Whilst most of the literature concentrates on large and complex bus systems, less attention has been paid to European medium-sized cities, the region’s most common urban configuration, where public transport mainly depends on bus services. To this end, a survey campaign was conducted on passengers of urban buses in Oviedo, Spain, a representative medium-sized city. An Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was used to identify key user satisfaction factors. In this case, three factors were the most important: comfort and information, service performance, and integration. That was complemented by the overall satisfaction (OS) with services, which was used for ranking the importance of the factors using an ordinal logistic regression model; comfort and information appear as the most important. These findings can serve bus operators to identify service-related attributes that need more attention or investment to increase users’ satisfaction and to make the service attractive to potential users.