Importance-Performance Analysis in Public Transportation: Methodological Revision for Practical Implementation

Abstract

Importance-performance analysis (IPA) is a common and accepted method used by service industries to improve their service and therefore increase customer satisfaction. In public transportation, it has been adopted to assess the attributes of transit system. To analyze the practical implementation of IPA in transit user satisfaction studies, an extensive literature review was carried out to identify challenges. Unlike the “performance” dimension, measuring “importance” is challenging, given the wide variety of approaches and specific methods. For practical application, choosing a specific method in a specific approach has diverse implications. Real-world transit user satisfaction surveys of three different bus transit (sub) systems in Bogotá were used to try, test, and compare results, methods, applications, and—from a practical perspective—to identify the pitfalls, risks, difficulties, advantages, and biases of using different techniques to measure importance in relation to public transportation services. At the end of the paper, the advantages and shortcomings of different importance measurement methods are synthesized, and easy-to-implement suggestions for practitioners are provided.