The results of this study demonstrate that improvements to
particular service attributes are expected to increase a user’s likeliness
to recommend transit to others. Most significantly, the more
satisfied a person is with his or her waiting and travel time, the
more likely he or she is to recommend the service to others (3.32
more likely). Therefore, transit agencies should implement various
improvement strategies in order to keep and increase users’ satisfaction
with their perceived waiting and travel time.
One way to make improvements to the way passengers perceive
waiting and travel time is to develop more frequent services
and implement strategies such as bus real time information. For
example, the STM’s iBus program which is being rolled out in
2015 and 2016, is expected to have a positive impact on increasing
the users’ willingness to recommend the service to others. The
users who are willing to recommend the service are not necessarily
the same ones that intend to use it in the future. In other words,
the intention to continue to use the service in the future is not correlated
with their willingness to recommend the service to others
in many aspects. Generally, users who are willing to recommend to
others and who intend to continue using it are older people and
who are satisfied with the service characteristics of the trip, particularly
their travel time. This means that transit agencies should
focus on continuing to improve transit travel times and develop
strategies to increase overall perceptions of service quality.