Six Reasons Why Supply-oriented Indicators Systematically Overestimate Service Quality in Public Transport

Supply-oriented measures of quality lead to a systematic overestimate of quality as experienced by travellers in public transport. An example is a train with an average occupation rate for seats being 50%, where, nevertheless, the occupation rate observed by travellers is much higher when some parts of the trajectory are busy. Similar examples are discussed for waiting times at stops, probabilities of arriving in time, probabilities of getting a connection and walking distances to bus stops. A plea is then made for putting more effort in measuring demand-oriented quality measures. © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd.