GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Introduction to Transport
In many countries, major investments are being made in public transport systems to make them more competitive in relation to other means of transport, most notably private vehicles. New services are being developed and old ones are being improved. However, an increase in supply (qualitatively or quantitatively) will not automatically lead to a corresponding increase in demand and satisfaction.
To make sure that investment really attracts both the existing and the potential customers envisaged, knowledge of satisfaction and service performance should provide policymakers and operational managers in public transport with valuable information.
Transportation in Karnataka
Karnataka, a state in South India has a well-developed transport system. Its capital city, Bangalore is well-connected by air to domestic and international destinations and the Bangalore International Airport (BIAL) in the city is one of the busiest airports in India.
It is also the headquarters of the airlines, Air Deccan and Kingfisher Airlines. The road transport is also well developed in the state with many National and State highways providing means for fast transportation. The headquarters of the South-Western Railway division of Indian Railways is located at Hubli and this division governs most of the railway network in the state. Konkan Railway which passes along the coastal region of the state is considered as one of the toughest engineering projects being undertaken in India till date. Buses, cars and trains are the means of transport for moving across distant places in Karnataka.
For transportation within the city or town limits; motorbikes, cars, auto rickshaws and buses are used. With the advent of low-cost airlines, many people are choosing to travel via air as well. Among the network of roads in Karnataka, 3973 km. of roads are National Highways. Karnataka also has state highways of length 9829 km. The road from Bangalore to Mysore (State Highway 17) is also well maintained and equal to the standard of a National Highway. The public bus transport in Karnataka is managed by the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC).
It was set up in the year 1961 with the objective of providing adequate, efficient, economic and properly coordinated road transport services. It operates 5100 schedules using 5400 vehicles covering 1. 95 million kilometers and an average of 2. 2 million passengers daily. About 25000 people are employed in KSRTC. For better management of public transport, KSRTC was bifurcated into three Corporations viz. , Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation, Bangalore on 15th Aug 1997, North-west Karnataka Road Transport Corporation, Hubli on 1st Nov 1997 and North-East Karnataka Road Transport Corporation, Gulbarga on 1st Oct 2000.
The reservation system is networked and computerized and tickets can be availed at designated kiosks in towns and cities. An online reservation system called AWATAR has also been devised by KSRTC using which travelers can reserve tickets online. KSRTC plies various categories of buses viz. Airavata, Mayura, Rajahamsa, Karnataka Saarige Bus with composite structure, Sheetal, KAVERI Medium floor City Bus, Corona AMBAARI, Corona AMBAARI Sleeper bus, Volvo VAIBHAVA low floor city bus, Mercedes-Benz bus, Volvo 6 Multi Axle Inter City bus, Vazra Grameena Sarige is another initiative by KSRTC to provide bus service to the rural populace of the state.
Buses run by private persons are allowed to operate in few districts of Karnataka. Inter district transportation are run by private operators, connecting capital Bangalore and main cities like Mangalore and Dharwad to district head quarters. Intra district transportation by private operators is currently allowed in Dakshina Kannada and Udupi districts. Omni bus and Maxi cabs are also other modes of road transportation in the state; especially where KSRTC does not buses or run very few.
Inter-City Bus Services The Road Transport Corporations
Act of 1950 initiated the creation of State Transport Undertakings (STUs) with monopoly franchises for many inter-city bus services. At their zenith in the early 1980s, the STUs controlled 45 percent of India’s bus fleet. While they incurred losses on most urban services, their rural and inter-city services generally covered operating costs.
The Motor Vehicle Act of 1988 reversed the policy, and encouraged greater reliance on the private sector, which led to increased competition for the STUs and mounting losses. By the year 2000, STU losses exceeded Rs. 22 billion; the Government then halted financial support to the STUs and encouraged State Governments to do the same. Despite restrictive granting of permits and unfavorable/discriminatory tax treatment for private operations, the private sector has won back a rapidly increasing share of the inter-city road passenger market, and now about 80 percent of the bus fleet is privately operated.
Unit costs of STU operations have escalated due to excessive staffing, and on average STU costs per passenger-kilometer are more than 40 percent higher than that of private operators. STU staff costs are now about three times that of the private sector; they employ on average 7 staff per bus at an average salary of Rs. 7, 700 per month, whereas for private operators those numbers are 4. 3 and Rs. 3, 500 respectively.
Reducing STU staffing and salaries to levels comparable with the private sector would result in an annual savings of around Rs. 0 billion. Not all of this would accrue to the economy, since some of it is a transfer from STU staff to bus passengers or tax payers. Redeployment of surplus STU staff, however, would be a true saving. The Association of State Road Transport Undertakings (ASRTU) has made a proposal for reform, the thrust of which generally supports corporatization of STUs, subsidies, compensation for social mandates imposed by Government, cross-subsidies among routes, and an expanded role for STUs in the regulation of inter-city services.
However the ASRTU proposals in some important respects : it is doubtful that the social obligations imposed on STUs, which the ASRTU would like to see paid as a subsidy to the STUs, could not be delivered more efficiently by the private sector; the case for the capital and route operating subsidies advocated by the ASRTU in the inter-city bus markets is at best weak; their proposed bundling of unprofitable routes with more profitable ones in order to provide a cross-subsidy to the former has generally been found unworkable.
If the primary objective is the best quality service at the lowest possible cost, the long-run strategy for inter-city bus services must be to move the STUs to majority private ownership in competitive markets as early as possible. Arguably, competition is more important than privatization.
However, so long as there are large labor forces employed by publicly owned carriers with high unit costs, the pressures to restrict competition and keep tariffs high to protect the least efficient carrier will remain strong, and this will protect not only the STUs but also serve as an umbrella to protect marginally efficient firms in the private sector as well — all at the expense of higher fares for bus users or higher taxes for the citizens at large.
The appropriate focus of regulatory policy in the case of road passenger transport should be qualitative standards related to the safety of services, and the minimization of negative environmental impacts. Safety dimensions encompass vehicle road worthiness standards (brakes, steering, tires, visibility, lighting and signaling), driver qualifications and working hours, and avoidance of overloading. With regard to the environment, standards should be phased in to require low emission buses, and also control the disposal of lubricant wastes and other materials.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Statement of the problem
Public sector road transport is successful in providing quality services to its passengers throughout Karnataka with competition from private sector. Being a government undertaking, it deals with all type of passengers throughout Karnataka. So, for this from school going students to old age persons are its passengers. The services of public sector are found good compared to private sector. The sector wants to increase its market share by retaining its loyal customers and attracting new one.
So to retain and attract new customers, satisfaction of the existing customers plays a major role. The information generated by the study will help in making better decisions. The study is done in Karnataka. The study attempts to determine how the passenger’s rate the services provided by the sector based on various factors.
Scope of the study
The scope of the study is to investigate overall customer perception with conventional public transport in Mangalore and Udupi, Karnataka. Since Karnataka has a wide range of public transport, the study will be conducted to measure the conventional public bus transport.
The study of conventional public road transport is important sign to makes it up since, the conventional public road transport one is majority of the public sector road transport in Karnataka.
Review of Literature
The sources of data include secondary data and primary data. Secondary data which is readily available and considered the cheapest and the easiest method of accessing to information has not been used for the present study as the data available did not give the required information. Hence more concentration is on primary data. Primary data are collected with a specific objective of finding the customer perception of services provided by the public sector road transport.
The questionnaire was divided into three parts:
- Demographics, the questioner item correspondent to city they live, age, sex, driving license, access to private transport mode and recommendation to use public bus transport,
- Travel pattern behavior, the related item concern about routine commute pattern, commute purpose, distance of travel, travel time, numbers of commute day in a week, majority daily transport of choice, and public bus transport use pattern,
- items measuring satisfaction with frequency, travel time, punctuality, price, information, cleanness, staff behavior, comfort, seat availability, bus stop security and condition, safety, and information.
The questionnaire was developed based on Benchmarking in Karnataka Service of Public Transport Service quality items that are measured derived from for public transport, such as reliability, employee, simplicity and design. Respondent were asked to rate their satisfaction to the item of overall satisfaction in specific quality attribute for public transport.
ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION DISCUSSION, CONCLUSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH
This section contained discussion, conclusion, practical recommendation, things that could have been carried out in better way. In the end of the section future study recommendation are presented.
Discussion
This study aimed at investigating whether overall customer satisfaction with Karnataka public bus transport is related to service quality attributes. Mangalore and Udupi citizen were asked to rate their satisfaction on the conventional bus on the paper and pencil questionnaire. From the frequency table finding, it reported that respondent is not satisfied with all the quality attributes.
This indicates that the quality of Karnataka public bus transport is under the travelers’ expectation of the service. Analysis suggests the attributes such as seat availability, bus fare, staff behavior, and safety measures that have strongest relationship with overall satisfaction. This finding is not surprising since these quality factors is reported in extensively in previous research of customer satisfaction in public transport. The service quality attributes that related to Karnataka public bus transport customer satisfaction is security on board. Stradling (2007) showed that feeling unsafe could affect customers’ willingness to choice public bus transport.
UK department for transport (UK Department for Transport 2009) and Smith ; Clark (Smith ; Clarke 2000) found that security issues such as pick pocketing have a relationship to overcrowded vehicles and lack of supervision. Increasing supervision in the bus by adding security personal on board or install the monitoring device on the public bus transport could increase the felling of safety and influence overall satisfaction with public bus transport. Travel time also has high correlation with overall satisfaction. Travel time is considered when choosing travel mode.
Customers are more satisfy when they perceived shorter travel time. Fuji et al (2001) found that after car users corrected they overestimates travel time using public bus transport; they travel more frequently with public bus transport. Van Vugt et al. 1996) also found that shorter travel time influences the decision of customer to choose public bus transport as a means of transport. Exclusive lane bus that applied for TransMangalore is one effort to shorter travel time.
The factor analysis conducted to reduce numbers of factor that correlated to overall customer satisfaction to simplify the decision maker to make an improvement, instead looking on specific items. From fourteen single services quality attributes that were observed to investigate customer satisfaction in public bus transport, the factor analysis suggest simplifying them into two factors called the functional factor and the soft factor.
The factor analysis grouped together frequency, price, punctuality and travel time as one factor that was interpreted as a functional factor of public bus transport and the other hand, soft factor of public bus transport service quality consist of safety and security (safe from accident, on board security and bus stop security), the comfort when traveling with public bus transport (bus comfort, cleanliness, seat availability, and information on the bus) and staff behavior. These two factors were analyzed with regression. The results demonstrated that there are other factors as well that influence customer satisfaction in public bus transport.
This result is confirmed by Oliver (1997) that noted as quality is one of several key dimensions which are factored into customer’s satisfaction judgment. Since the two factors only have low influence in overall customer satisfaction, it is interesting to investigate such factor in order to get more complete picture to develop an attractive public bus transport in the future. Analysis was also carried separately for the Mangalore and Udupi cities due to their differences in travel demand. Mangalore is a busy city where a majority of the travel demand pertains to travel with a working purpose whereas a majority of the travel demand in JogMangalore pertains to travel with a studying purpose.
The analysis showed that different types of factors influence customer satisfaction in each city but the strongest factor in each city is the same. Mangalore primary factor is similar to functional factor with bus stop security quality as additional factor. To summarize, the overall result show that service quality attributes influences overall customer satisfaction in using public bus transport. The service quality could be evaluated and improved by analyzing single attributes but also by analyzing factors based on several attributes. The overall aim is to make public bus transport an attractive, satisfied, and marketable mode of transport.
Conclusion
High increasing motorization in Karnataka causes many problems in traffic congestion, a high level of pollution, a high consumption non-renewable energy resource, a threat to quality of life and a high number of traffic accidents. Public bus transport should become the solution for sustainable transport in the future, which is the reason to increase customer satisfaction. High quality public bus transport not only keep customer to continue using public bus transport to fulfill their travel demand but also attract potential customer.
The functional factor has a strong influence on customer satisfaction and need a higher attention to improve customer atisfaction. Frequency, price, punctuality and travel time are the crucial factor that is responsible in bringing higher level of satisfaction. Listen the voice of customer is a common and effective way to identify the customer need and the way to satisfy them. Several cities in different European countries are already measuring customer satisfaction annually.
United Kingdom also conducted a study to identify customer need in public transport. The effort in research is dedicated to develop a attractive and marketable public transport. According to the results of this study, Karnataka customer is not satisfied with public bus transport service.
Thus, public bus transport can not compete with the attractiveness of the private car (Steg 2003). Karnataka Public bus transport Authority should start to pay attention to the voice of customer to make better public bus transport otherwise disappointed existing customer will turn their choice into private motorize. The study should be conducted annually to evaluate public bus transport performance and create some corrective improvement to satisfy customer. Additional analysis was carried out in Mangalore and Udupi. The results showed that a functional factor is most important in both cities. Frequency is pointed out due to limited number of supply that could not fulfill high number of travel demand.
Travel time pointed out due to certain number of capacity fulfillment in public bus transport bringing longer travel time. Price pointed out because customer do not experience of better value that they pay for public bus transport. This three related service quality has to be improved to keep existing customer and attract more customer.
Practical Recommendation
In order to improve customer satisfaction on public bus transport, public transport decision maker and provider have to improve service quality in public bus transport. The service attributes could be improved as single attributes or as the factor. * The functional factor has a strong influence on customer satisfaction.
Public bus transport decision maker and provider could start to pay attention to increase public bus transport supply due to high number of travel demand especially in peak hour, shorter travel time of public bus transport with giving special line in order to avoid high congested road, and giving more value to the price that customer pays for their public bus transport service.
When service quality is analyzed at an attribute level it is revealed that on board security is very important. One way to increase on board security is to limit the opportunity for pickpockets and other criminal activities onboard the buses. There are several possibilities: add security personal, close bus doors during operation time and install surveillance tools.
