Abstract:

This paper presents a practical approach for monitoring public transportation systems' performance by focusing on customer evaluations. Within the framework of the developed method, 22 indicators are aggregated for 6 different measures, which are time, cost, accessibility and transfer, comfort, safety – security and quality of service respectively. Passenger Oriented Performance IndeX (POPIX) has been developed and applied to the Istanbul Metro, Light Rail and Tram systems. The goal of this research is to propose a new customer oriented performance index for transportation systems, enabling a reliable and objective base for monitoring system performance by setting performance goals and identifying priorities. Meanwhile, the proposed methodology also allows for the investigation of the performance changes of a particular transportation system and for performance comparison of different systems directly from the customer point of view. The data of the index is attained by the Customer Satisfaction Survey of Istanbul Public Railways' 2005, 2006 and 2007. The POPIX methodology has been defined and the corresponding POPIX scores are calculated for the systems investigated. Furthermore, the % POPIX concept has been developed for the comparison of different systems. Lastly, the shifted POPIX concept has been proposed for more reliable comparison between different years. The framework has been implemented to the public railway systems and individual index scores are calculated for each indicator, measure and overall system. The measures of cost, accessibility and transfer and comfort have lower index scores. Metro index scores are superior in comparison to the Tram and Light Rail for all the years analyzed.

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