User Satisfaction and Its Impacts on the Use of a Public Bicycle System

Abstract

This research examined the evaluation of service quality in the public bicycle system (PBS) in Hangzhou, China, along with a measurement of user satisfaction, and of how an individual's perceived satisfaction influenced his or her PBS use. A 30-item PBS service quality scale was first developed and then applied to the empirical study of PBS service in Hangzhou. On the basis of a finally validated sample of 231 responses, an item-based PBS service quality assessment and an individual-based satisfaction assessment were obtained with a Rasch model. Thereafter, individual satisfaction was introduced as one of the explanatory variables in modeling PBS customers' frequency of use in a logistic regression approach. According to the analysis, environmental factors, such as nighttime illumination and shade along the bicycle way, and service factors, such as convenient withdrawal of the deposit, proper handling of customer complaints, and an increase in station density, were thought to be in most urgent need of improvement by the interviewed Hangzhou PBS users. The respondents tended to give positive marks to the PBS service in Hangzhou, with a quantitative measure of 1.49 ± 0.31, in a range of [-7.74, 7.89] [all in the log-odds unit (logit)]. The present work also proved that a one-unit increase in user-perceived satisfaction would increase the likelihood of a user's moving into a higher use-frequency level, as defined in the study, by almost 35%.

Impact of Different Stakeholders of Bike-Sharing Industry on Users’ Intention of Civilized Use of Bike-Sharing

“…Zhang et al [24] mentioned that vehicle tracking technology may play an important role in solving the problem of uncivilized behaviors. However, they neither explained why nor tested whether this is true.…”

“…Efthymiou et al [23] focus on personal characteristics and find that income, age and environment conscious influence people's intention to use. Zhang et al [24] summarized 30 items to measure user satisfaction towards bike-sharing scheme and found that perceived satisfaction is an important antecedent of public bike-sharing usage.…”

“…Past literature mentioned the importance of collaboration among different stakeholders of the bike-sharing scheme such as government, public and firms [1,9]. For example, Zhang et al [24] emphasized the collaboration of government and bike-sharing firms in facilitating the sustainable development of bike-sharing scheme. However, few studies explained why collaboration is important and how government and bike-sharing firms should collaborate.…”

Are they telling the truth? Revealing hidden traits of satisfaction with a public bike-sharing service

“…Research concerning user satisfaction for BSSs includes analyses carried out in Canada (Bachand-Marleau et al, 2012;El-Assi et al, 2015), the United States , Australia (Fishman et al, 2014) and the United Kingdom (Kingham et al, 2001). The China case is analysed by and, for the case of the world's biggest BSS in Hangzhou, by Zhang et al (2015a). One shared feature of these studies is that they are presented as a result of a research project proposed to and conducted in partnership with the institutions owning and managing the BSSs, being seldom conducted independently (see also Kingham et al, 2001;Grigoroudis & Siskos, 2004).…”

A Visual Analysis Approach for Inferring Personal Job and Housing Locations Based on Public Bicycle Data

“…The impacts of built environment factors on the trip demand and the ratio of demand to supply at bike stations were investigated in the paper [23]. The service quality of the PBS in Hangzhou was evaluated and user satisfaction was measured; positive feedback was received from the respondents [24]. Visual analysis techniques offer an opportunity to extract meaningful information from PBS data.…”