Improved transportation services are a crucial component of urban growth, particularly in emerging cities like Dhaka. Ensuring an improved public bus service quality is a challenge for the city's transport planners and policy makers. Nevertheless, this challenge can't be met without the support of the residents of this city. This study intends to evaluate the commuters' willingness to pay (WTP) for an improved and better public bus service quality in Dhaka city. It also attempts to explore the factors affecting the commuters' WTP amounts. In order to accomplish the study's goals, a stated preference survey was designed to enquire into the whys and wherefores of female passengers' harassment on public buses and also to prefer some influential service quality features. WTP values of respondents were calibrated using binary and ordinal logistic models, and these models were developed using SPSS version 26. The results indicate that the majority of respondents were willing to pay more for better service facilities, and they point to security as the most important factor in determining how much extra fare commuters are willing to pay. The results also demonstrate that commuters' WTP amounts are highly influenced by the respondents' monthly income. Results from this study have important policy implications, such as protecting women's safety on public transportation and taking commuters' socio-demographic characteristics into account before enacting any legislation or increasing fares.

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Bangladesh is one of the most populated developing countries where public bus service plays a vital role as a public transport mode since it is easily available and cost-effective. In the social, commercial, educational, and administrative spheres, women's participation in the labor force in economic enterprises is steadily expanding in the country. Very little research considers only women commuters to analyze the service quality of public buses and they selected only Dhaka city as a study area. However, a large number of trips were generated by women commuters in the industrial and commercial zones such as Gazipur, Narayanganj, and Dhaka. This paper ascertains the public bus service attributes that affect women commuters' satisfaction as well as finds out the major problems of women commuters while traveling on public buses and the possible solutions to them. This survey included 766 women commuters from Dhaka, Narayanganj, and Gazipur who were interviewed face to face. Structural Equation Model (SEM) was used as the instrument for identifying the service quality (SQ) attributes that influenced the women commuters' satisfaction. A series of models were developed based on the trial-anderror method and the model M 3 is selected as the best fit according to SEM fit indices values. The study's main goal was to compile a list of service quality attributes that influence women commuters' satisfaction. Major issues with the current public bus service in terms of safety and security, as well as remedies, were identified through discussions with experienced female commuters. These findings reveal that women commuters' satisfaction is primarily influenced by safety and security, as well as the degree of comfort provided by bus service because they frequently encounter major safety and security issues on public buses and want an immediate remedy. This paper offers some po-How to cite this paper: Umme, A., Aya, K. and Hisashi, K.