RAILWAYS IN EUROPE: A NEW ERA?
Improving the Quality of the
Door-to-Door Rail Journey:
A Customer-Oriented Approach
MARTIJN BRONS and PIET RIETVELD
In order to improve the position of the railways, the journey should be made more
attractive compared to competing modes such as the car. In doing so, adopting a
customer-oriented approach is very important. Such an approach implies: (i) a focus
on the subjective experience of the passenger rather than on the objective quality;
and (ii) a focus on all elements of the door-to-door rail journey rather than only the
rail trip itself. This study provides an analysis of the customer experience of various
dimensions of the door-to-door rail journey. We analyse both the satisfaction with
each of the dimensions and their relative importance for the rail passenger. We find
that travel comfort and time reliability are the two most important dimensions
of the journey. Travel time reliability deserves more attention as the satisfaction
is very low. Infrequent rail travellers are in general more satisfied, attach more
importance to accessibility and travel time reliability, and less importance to travel
comfort. Travellers with car availability are on average slightly more satisfied than
captive rail passengers. Compared with other passengers, those under twenty years
old attach less importance to the rail trip itself and more to the elements related to
the other segments of the door-to-door journey, i.e. station access and transfer point.
We find that the customer satisfaction has increased in the period 2001–2005.
Elements related to the rail trip itself have become less important during this period
while elements related to station access and transfer have increased in importance.
Increasing levels of congestion, growing
awareness of climate change and the notion of
peak oil constitute some of the most important
global challenges today. European policymaking views the promotion of sustainable
mobility as one of the key objectives of
transport policy (see European Commission,
2001). Railways are the natural backbone of
any sustainable transport system, offering
efficient transport built on social equity, low
carbon emissions, low environmental impacts
and positive economic growth.1 Hence,
improving the position of the railways is one
of the elements in this transition towards
sustainable mobility. While policy-makers
30
and rail operators have common goals, i.e.
increasing the number of rail passengers,
there is an increasing imbalance between
them in terms of approach. Maintaining rail
service quality is safeguarded by policymakers through concessions in which railway
operators are typically held accountable for
measurable indicators of quality aspects,
such as punctuality. At the same time,
the ambitions of European rail operators,
including the Dutch National Railways, as
reflected by company mission and media
statements, tend to develop towards a more
customer-oriented focus. As it is ultimately
the traveller who makes the choice whether
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or not to travel by rail, the transition towards
a customer-oriented approach seems to
provide more potential for improving the
position of the railways than a pure processoriented focus and should therefore be
adopted and supported by policy-makers.
According to Kotler (2001) every customer
views a product as a bundle of product
characteristics or attributes, each of which
– to varying degrees – provides benefits and
satisfies needs.
In the context of policy-making aimed
at improving the position of the railways,
such a customer-oriented approach to the
rail journey has two important implications.
First, the focus should not be restricted to
the rail trip itself but should encompass all
elements of the journey door-to-door. This
includes, inter alia, the access to the station
by other modes, the process of obtaining a
ticket, the time to reach the platform, the
waiting time and the transfer to another
train. According to research by MuConsult
(2002), only 41 per cent a Netherlands
Railways passenger’s total quality score is
determined by the quality of the rail trip
itself, while the quality of access and egress
accounts for 21 per cent, the quality of the
transfer(s) 25 per cent, and other factors 13
per cent. Second, improvement of the quality
of certain elements of the rail journey is only
useful insofar as these elements influence the
overall satisfaction of the customer. In other
words, transport policy-makers should not
focus on the objective quality of an element,
but on the passengers’ satisfaction with the
element and on how important the element
is for the passenger.
In this paper we provide an overview of
the customer experience of the rail journey
in the Netherlands. We adopt a customeroriented approach in the sense that we
focus on all elements of the door-to-door rail
journey in the analysis rather than restricting
ourselves to the rail trip itself. In doing so,
we include both ‘hard’ dimensions that
are easily measurable, such as travel time
reliability, service schedule and accessibility,
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and ‘soft’ dimensions, such as personal
safety, travel comfort and information services. We analyse both the satisfaction level
with the dimensions of the rail journey and
the relative importance of each of these
dimensions for the travellers. Furthermore,
we explore differences in the travel experience between various subgroups of rail
travellers and analyse developments over
time. Effective and cost-efficient rail policy
aimed at increasing the overall satisfaction
of the rail passengers should – in addition
to assessing the current satisfaction and
the relative importance of each dimension
– take into account information on the costs
of improving the satisfaction. While we do
not incorporate information on the costs of
improving dimensions of the rail journey in
our analysis, we do provide suggestions and
conclusions which are based on assumptions
about such costs.
The outline of the paper is as follows. The
next section briefly discusses the survey
conducted by Dutch Railways on which
our analysis is based. This section also introduces the dimensions of the rail journey
that we include in our analysis. In the third
section, we analyse the satisfaction with the
dimensions of the rail journey and their
importance for the rail passengers. The
fourth section analyses the travel experience
of various subgroups of rail travellers
and compares them to the total group of
passengers. In the fifth section, we analyse
the development of the satisfaction and
importance of the dimensions of the rail
journey over time. The final section presents
our conclusions and discusses some policy
implications.
Data Overview and Identification of the
Dimensions of the Rail Journey
Data Overview
In order to analyse the customer experience of
the rail journey, we use survey data, collected
in the context of the Customer Satisfaction
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RAILWAYS IN EUROPE: A NEW ERA?
Research (KTO) of the Netherlands Railways
(NS). This is an on-going research on the
(development of) the quality of service of
the Netherlands Railways in the Netherlands.
The KTO consists of observations of rail
passengers’ satisfaction, represented by a
score from 1 (‘cannot be worse’) to 10 (‘excellent’). A score of 5 stands for ‘insufficient’ and
a score of 6 for ‘sufficient’. The passengers
are asked to give an overall satisfaction score
for the rail journey as well as satisfaction
scores for more than forty individual aspects
of the rail journey. For each respondent,
individual characteristics are also registered.
These include personal characteristics such
as age and gender, and domain-specific
characteristics such as travel frequency and
car availability. The number of individuals
interviewed is about 70,000 per year (see
Schreurs, 2005).
The data used for this paper cover the
period from January 2001 to December 2005.
We make use of the respondents’ scores for
thirty-seven individual aspects of the rail
journey in combination with the individual
characteristics of each respondent. The
quality aspects are listed in the first column
of table 2 while table 1 provides an overview
of the individual characteristics.
Quality Dimensions of the Rail Journey
For the purpose of our analysis we group the
thirty-seven aspects into a smaller number of
dimensions of the rail journey. The reasons
for doing this are as follows. First, some
elements of the rail journey are logically
grouped together since they represent
similar or the same underlying concept. For
example, the four personal safety attributes in
table 2 can be replaced by a single dimension
labelled personal safety. Second, aspects
which measure the same underlying concept
are statistically correlated which may lead
to biased results of our statistical analysis.
Third, it enhances the illustrative quality
of the graphical representation of analysis
results, and yields more insight into the
customer perception of different dimensions
of the rail journey.
Our categorization follows Brons and Rietveld (2007), who use Principal Component
Analysis (PCA) (see Hair et al., 1998) in order
to group the thirty-seven quality aspects of
the rail journey. Based on the statistical
correlation pattern between the satisfaction
variables, the PCA results indicate that ten
factors (or dimensions) can be extracted
from the data, which summarize or account
for the original set of observed satisfaction
scores with each of the elements. The results
furthermore provide us with factor loadings
and factor score weights for each of the thirtyfive satisfaction variables with respect to
each of the ten extracted factors. The squared
factor loadings indicate the percentage of
the variance in a satisfaction variable that
is explained by a factor. The factor score
Table 1. Individual characteristics of travellers covered in the NS customer satisfaction survey.
General individual
characteristics
Age
Gender
Usual departure station
<20 yrs; 20–59 yrs; >60 yrs
Female; Male
Within the Randstad; not within the Randstad
Domain-specific individual
characteristics
Car availability
Travel purpose
Travel timing
Car available; no car available
Work or education; business; leisure
Mostly during peak hours; mostly during offpeak hours; Both
Less than 4 times per year; between 4 times per
year and once per week; more than once per
week
Ticket without discount; ticket with discount;
weekly, monthly or yearly ticket
Travel frequency
Ticket
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weights represent the weight each satisfaction
variable should get in order to compute the
factor score, i.e. the standardized composite
measure created for each observation on
each factor. Based on the PCA results, Brons
and Rietveld (2007) proceed as follows. First,
variables for which the satisfaction scores
have a factor loading higher than 0.42 on
the same factor are grouped together.3 The
resulting ten groups constitute the underlying
dimensions of the rail journey. An overview
of the thirty-seven quality aspects and the
classification into ten dimensions is given
in table 2.
For each of the ten dimensions a satisfaction
score is calculated as the weighted average
satisfaction score of the quality aspects
represented by that dimension. The weights
are equal to the standardized factor score
weights (for details see Brons et al., 2008).
Table 2. Classification of the quality elements of the rail journey into dimensions of traveller satisfaction.
Element of the Rail Journey
Dimension
‘Approachability’ of train conductor
Friendliness/helpfulness of conductor
Seat capacity in the train
Riding and sitting comfort in the train
Heating and ventilation in the train
Cleanliness of train interior
Travel time reliability
Station overview
Signage at station
Travel information at station
Cleanliness of station
Protection against wind, rain and cold
Connections with other trains
Service frequency of the trains
Information available at home
Intelligibility of audio messages at the station
Information on delays and platform changes
Intelligibility of audio messages inside the train
Information in train at departure/arrival
Information in train during delays
Price-quality ratio
Guarded bicycle parking
Unguarded bicycle parking
Connections with public transport
Car parking capacity
Train taxi
Possibilities to buy a ticket
Queuing time at ticket vending machine
Queuing time at ticket counter
Friendliness of personnel at ticket counter
Personal safety during daytime at station
Personal safety during night time at station
Personal safety in the train
Approachability of service personnel
Friendliness of service personnel
Approachability of train conductor
Friendliness of train conductor
Travel comfort
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Travel time reliability
Station organisation and information
Service schedule
Dynamic information
Price-quality ratio
Accessibility
Ticket service
Personal safety
Personnel
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RAILWAYS IN EUROPE: A NEW ERA?
Customer Satisfaction, Importance and
Impact of the Dimensions of the Rail
Journey
Satisfaction
Figure 1 displays the mean satisfaction score
for each of the individual dimensions of the
rail journey and the mean overall satisfaction
score of the rail journey. With a score of 6.4,
the overall satisfaction with the rail journey
is relatively high in the sense that it exceeds
the average of the satisfaction scores of the
individual dimensions. This may indicate that
there are other dimensions of the rail journey,
not covered in the questionnaire, which have
a high satisfaction score.
Of the individual dimensions, respondents
are most satisfied with the ‘station organization and information’ but only to the
extent of seeing it as slightly better than
sufficient. This is the only dimension with
a satisfaction score which is higher than
the overall satisfaction. Passengers are least
satisfied with the price-quality ratio, the
travel time reliability and the accessibility4
of rail stations.
In general it seems that passengers are
more satisfied with the dimensions related to
information or ‘soft’ aspects such as comfort
and personal safety while dimensions that
represent ‘hard’ elements such as accessibility,
service schedule, travel time reliability and
price-quality ratio are on average rated lower
or ‘insufficient’.
Relative Importance
While it is interesting to gain insight
into the satisfaction with the individual
dimensions of the rail journey, this does not
necessarily indicate which elements should
be improved upon. In order to increase the
overall satisfaction with the rail journey,
the importance that the dimensions have
for passengers should also be taken into
account. In order to assess the importance of
each dimension we apply a so-called derived
importance analysis (see Gustafsson and
Johnson, 2004). The underlying idea is that
the overall satisfaction score can be seen as
a weighted average of the satisfaction scores
for each of the individual dimensions.5 With
the derived importance analysis we estimate
the weight of each dimension. The higher
the weight is, the higher the importance of
the satisfaction with a dimension for the
Figure 1. Satisfaction scores
for the dimension of the rail
journey. (N = 17,986)
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Figure 2. Estimated relative
importance of the dimensions
of the rail journey. (N = 17,986)
overall satisfaction.6 The estimated weights
are shown in figure 2.
The results show that travel comfort and
travel time reliability are the most important
dimensions of the rail journey. The impact of
the satisfaction with these two dimensions on
the overall satisfaction with the rail journey is
more than twice as high as the impact of any
of the other dimensions. The ticket service,
personal safety and personnel are the least
important for the rail passengers.
In figure 3, both the satisfaction and
importance of each dimension are displayed
in a so-called importance and satisfaction
diagram (Gordon, 2003). The position on the
horizontal axis represents the satisfaction
score of a dimension, while the position on
the vertical axis indicates the importance.
The vertical line represents the overall
satisfaction score. As shown before, travel
comfort and travel time reliability are the
two most important dimensions of the rail
journey. However, as the satisfaction score
of comfort is close to the overall satisfaction,
its actual impact on the overall satisfaction
is rather low. The impact of travel time
reliability is much higher (and negative) as
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the satisfaction score is much lower than
the overall satisfaction score. Evidently,
the actual impact of each dimension on the
overall satisfaction score depends on both
the satisfaction score and the importance.
The impact of a dimension on the overall
satisfaction is positive when the satisfaction
score is higher than the overall satisfaction
score and negative when it is lower. Furthermore, the impact (be it positive or negative)
of a dimension is stronger when its weight is
higher. Hence, the overall satisfaction can be
increased in two ways: first, by improving the
quality of individual dimensions of the rail
journey (in particular those dimensions with
a high importance); second, by decreasing
the importance of dimensions with a low
satisfaction score or increasing the importance
of those with a high satisfaction score. As rail
operators will in general have less control
over the perceived importance of aspects
of rail journey than over the satisfaction
we focus on quality improvements in our
analysis.7
Rail operators aiming at increasing customer satisfaction must take account of three
aspects when considering how to improve the
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RAILWAYS IN EUROPE: A NEW ERA?
Figure 3. Satisfaction
and importance of
dimensions of the rail
journey. (N = 17,986)
rail service: the current satisfaction with each
dimension of the rail journey; the importance
of each dimension to the passengers; and the
costs of improving the satisfaction of each
dimension. It is only when accounting for
these that the scope for improving customer
satisfaction with the rail becomes apparent.
This paper does not assess the costs involved
in improving the satisfaction of the different
dimensions. Nevertheless, it is clear that
improvements in some dimensions will be
more costly, and in various respects more
difficult, to achieve. Compared with travel
time reliability (which might require increasing the network capacity or reducing
the number of services in congested parts),
the quality of the stations and the service
schedule (in terms of service frequency), it is
probably more feasible and cost-efficient to
improve dynamic information, accessibility of
stations (including the coordination of service
schedules of trains and public transport),
even if those dimensions were found to have
less of an impact on the overall satisfaction.
36
Satisfaction, Importance and Impact
of Dimensions of the Rail Journey:
Differences between Passenger Subgroups
In the previous section we focused on the
satisfaction and importance of each of the
dimensions of the rail journey for the complete sample of rail passengers in the
customer satisfaction dataset. In this section
we focus on the results for specific subgroups of passengers and compare them
with the results of the complete sample. The
subgroups we analyse are infrequent rail
passengers, passengers with car availability
and passengers under twenty.
Infrequent Rail Passengers
Infrequent rail passengers are defined as
passengers who make use of rail transport
less than four times per year. Due to the low
travel frequency there may be considerable
scope for increasing the number of rail trips
by this group.8 Therefore, it is interesting
to analyse the rail travel experience of this
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group in order to help identify how the travel
frequency of the group could be increased.
In the same fashion as we did for the total
sample of travellers, we calculated the satisfaction scores for each of the dimensions
of the journey, estimated their relative importance and displayed the results in a scatter
plot (see figure 4).9
The figure shows that the satisfaction of
infrequent passengers is, in general, higher
than that of the total sample of respondents.
A reason for this may be that the group of
infrequent passengers consists of a relatively
large share of leisure passengers for whom the
trip by rail is part of the positive experience
of the leisure trip. Furthermore, due to the
timing of their trips, leisure passengers are
less likely to be confronted with some of the
negative experiences associated with day-today travelling during peak hours, such as
limited seat capacity, disruptions and delays.
This may also explain why travel comfort is
less important for this group of travellers as
they are less exposed to uncomfortable travel
circumstances.
From figure 4 it follows that infrequent
passengers attach more value to travel time
reliability. There may be a self-selection
mechanism at work here in the sense that
those travellers who find travel time reliability important prefer to choose the car (or
other modes) instead of the train more often,
due to a higher perceived reliability of the
latter mode.
There is a large difference in the importance
of station accessibility between the group of
infrequent travellers and the total sample
of respondents; for infrequent travellers,
accessibility is one of the most important
dimensions, while for frequent travellers
it is one of the least important. This result
may indicate that, on average, infrequent
passengers live further away from the
station, or have less access modes available,
which would make them more dependent on
specific access modes. This would explain
why they attach more value to the presence
of access-mode related facilities at the station,
and at the same time might explain why they
use the train less frequently.
From the results discussed in this section it
follows that in order to make the rail journey
more attractive to this group, improving the
satisfaction with travel time reliability and
Figure 4. Satisfaction and
importance of dimension of
the rail journey for infrequent
rail passengers. (N = 697)
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RAILWAYS IN EUROPE: A NEW ERA?
accessibility can play an important role. Of
the two options, improving the accessibility of
stations (including the coordination of service
schedules of trains and public transport) is
probably less costly than improving the
travel time reliability.
Improvements in the travel comfort may
also contribute to an increase in the overall
satisfaction but as the satisfaction with travel
comfort is relatively high, there may be
limited scope for improvements there.
Rail Passengers below Twenty Years of Age
Insights into the perception of the rail
journey by rail passengers below twenty may
provide indications of future developments
in passengers’ perception. This group of
travellers is characterized by low car ownership and relatively frequent use of bike and
public transport.
We analyse satisfaction and importance
levels for this group and compare them
with the results for the total sample of
respondents. The results for the group of
respondents under twenty are displayed in
figure 5.
Comparing the results with those in figure
3 shows that for most dimensions of the
journey, the satisfaction level of the younger
generation is very comparable to that of the
total sample of passengers. With respect to
the importance of the various dimensions
there are some interesting differences. Those
elements of the door-to-door journey that are
related to the rail trip itself, such as travel
time reliability, service schedule and value for
money are less important for the passengers
under twenty than for the total sample of
passengers. With respect to those elements
that are related to the other segments of
the door-to-door journey, i.e. access mode
and station, such as the accessibility of the
station, organization and information on the
station and dynamic information the opposite
holds. These elements are found to be more
important for the group of passengers under
twenty than for the total group of passengers.
These results may represent an age effect in
the sense that rail passengers’ perception
of the journey changes over their lifetimes
due to, inter alia, travel experience, changes
in income, a change in student travel card
eligibility. Alternatively, perceptions may be
Figure 5. Satisfaction and
importance of the dimensions
of the rail journey for the
respondents under twenty
years of age. (N = 5,493)
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stable over passengers’ lifetimes but differ
between different generations of passengers.
In the latter case the results may indicate a
general trend of increasing importance of
the non-rail segments of the door-to-door rail
journey. We focus on this issue in the next
section where we analyse developments over
time. Finally, we find that personal safety is
less of a concern for younger travellers than
for the group as a whole.
satisfaction scores are higher for the group
of choice travellers, although the differences
are small. The reason for this could be that
this group consists only of travellers who
preferred the train over the car, whereas the
total sample of passengers includes captive
passengers who chose the train but would
have chosen the car, if given the possibility.
In terms of importance, there are virtually no
differences between the groups.
Passengers with Car Availability
Satisfaction, Importance and Impact
of Dimensions of the Rail journey:
Developments between 2001–2005
For many trips, the car is the main competing
mode for rail transport. The availability of a
car plays an important role in the mode
choice. In this section we analyse the rail
experience of rail passengers with car availability, the so-called choice travellers, and
compare this to the total sample of rail
passengers. The satisfaction and importance
of the dimensions of the journey are displayed in figure 6.
Comparing the results in figure 6 with the
results for the total sample of passengers
shows that there are no big differences
between the two groups. On average, the
The analysis in the previous sections was
based on a set of 17,986 observations covering
the years 2001 to 2005. In this section we
focus on the differences between the first and
the last year in our database, so as to obtain
insight into the development of the customer
experience between 2001 and 2005. Analysis
of trends in the past may serve as guidelines
to predict future developments.
The results are shown in the form of an
importance and satisfaction diagram in figure
7. For each dimension of the rail journey, we
Figure 6. Satisfaction and
importance of the dimensions
of the rail journey for the
group of respondents with car
availability. (N = 6,249)
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RAILWAYS IN EUROPE: A NEW ERA?
Figure 7. Development of the
satisfaction and importance of
dimensions of the rail journey in
the period 2001–2005. (N = 1,131
for 2001; N = 3,712 for 2005)
have two data points. A closed black circle
indicates the satisfaction and importance in
2001. An open circle indicates the satisfaction
and importance in 2005.
The figure indicates an increasing trend in
the satisfaction score. For the majority of the
dimensions, the satisfaction in 2005 is higher
than that in 2001, the only exception being
the dimension ‘personnel’. The satisfaction
score of the travel time reliability shows the
largest increase.
Another trend suggested by the graph is a
convergence of the relative importance among
dimensions, in the sense that dimensions with
a high importance in 2001 have become less
important in 2005, while dimensions with a
low importance in 2001 have become more
important. The only exception is, again, the
dimension ‘personnel’. The latter result may
be because many aspects of the rail journey
which traditionally involved personnel, such
as the purchase of a ticket and the retrieval
of information, are gradually replaced by
40
ticket vending machines and automated
information points.
A related development is that those
dimensions of the door-to-door rail journey
that are related to the rail trip itself, such
as reliability, travel comfort and value for
money, are becoming less important while
those dimensions that are related to the other
segments of the door-to-door trip, i.e. access
mode and station, such as accessibility of the
station, station organization and information
and dynamic information have become more
important. These results suggest that some of
the difference between age groups discussed
above is caused by a general trend of convergence rather than individual changes over
lifetimes.
Conclusions and Policy Implications
Summary and Conclusions
In order to improve the position of the
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railways, the journey should be made more
attractive compared to competing modes such
as the car. In doing so, adopting a customeroriented approach is essential. Such an
approach implies (i) a focus on the subjective
experience of the passenger rather than on
the objective quality and (ii) a focus on all
elements of the door-to-door rail journey
rather than only the train ride itself. This
paper provides an overview of the subjective
experience of the rail passenger, by focusing
on ten different dimensions of the door-todoor rail journey, including elements related
to the access of the station and the transfer.
The analysis focused on the satisfaction level
of dimensions of the rail journey and on the
importance of each of the dimensions for the
passengers, as evidenced by the impact on
the overall satisfaction of the passenger.
The results show that travel comfort
and travel time reliability are the two most
important dimensions of the journey in the
sense that they have the strongest impact on
the overall satisfaction. In terms of satisfaction
however, travel time reliability scores much
worse than travel comfort. Furthermore,
we found that infrequent rail travellers are
generally more satisfied, perhaps because
this group consists of relatively many leisure
travellers who are less likely to be confronted
with the negative experience of day-to-day
commuting during peak hours. Probably
for the same reasons this group attaches
less importance to travel comfort. Infrequent
travellers attach more value to accessibility
and travel time reliability, which may be one
of the reasons behind the small number of
rail trips by this group. Respondents with car
availability (so-called choice travellers) were
found to be slightly more satisfied than the
average respondent, which may be caused by
the fact that the latter group includes captive
rail passengers who would have chosen the
car, if given the choice.
Finally, we analysed the development of
satisfaction and importance levels in the
period 2001–2005. The results showed that
satisfaction has increased for almost all
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dimensions. Furthermore, we found that
dimensions that are related to the rail trip
itself have decreased in relative importance
during this period while elements related
to the other segments of the door-to-door
rail journey, i.e. access mode and transfer,
have become relatively more important. This
trend is also suggested by the results for the
passengers under twenty, who attach more
importance to the elements related to the
access mode and transfer point than other
passengers.
Policy Implications
This paper is centred around the notion
that improvement of the position of the
railways, in terms of number or share of rail
passengers can be achieved by increasing
the overall satisfaction with the door-todoor rail journey. From a transport policy
point of view, the crucial question concerns
the choice of which elements of the door-todoor journey to improve. Taking into account
principles of effectiveness and cost-efficiency,
the answer depends on three aspects: (i) the
current satisfaction with an element; (ii)
the importance of the element; and (iii) the
costs of increasing the satisfaction with the
element. In this paper, we did not incorporate
information on the cost aspect but restricted
ourselves to analyzing the satisfaction and
importance.
Based on those two criteria, the results of
the analysis support investments in improving the travel time reliability and travel
comfort, as these elements are found most
important for the passengers. Having said
that, improving travel time reliability (which
might require increasing the network capacity or reducing the number of services)
may be costly and the scope for improving
the satisfaction with travel comfort (which
already has a relatively high satisfaction
score) may be limited. As improving the
quality of the station and the service schedule
may also be costly it is probably more feasible
and cost-efficient to achieve improvements in
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RAILWAYS IN EUROPE: A NEW ERA?
the quality of the access-to-station facilities
– especially for the smaller stations on the
network. This becomes even more apparent
from the results for the group of infrequent
passengers. The result that accessibility is
relatively important for this group may be one
of the main reasons for their low number of
rail trips. The fact that this group constitutes
a potential market for increasing the number
of rail trips, supports the conjecture that
improving station accessibility is probably
the most cost-efficient way of increasing the
overall satisfaction of the rail passenger.
The main conclusions from the study is
that the door-to-door rail journey can be seen
as a product that consists of many elements
or dimensions, and that the satisfaction with
each of these elements affects the overall
satisfaction level, to various degrees. This has
two important implications for policy aimed
at improving the position of the railways.
First, the focus should not be restricted to
‘hard’ or easily measurable dimensions
such as punctuality, service schedule or
price but should also involve ‘soft’ aspects
such as comfort, information services and
personal safety. Second, the focus should
not be restricted to elements that are related
to the rail trip itself but should also involve
elements that are related to the other
segments of the door-to-door rail journey,
i.e. access mode and transfer, such as station
accessibility and station organization. The
results of the paper indicate that the latter
elements have become even more important
over time, a trend which may continue in
the future. This emphasizes the need for a
development towards a customer-oriented
focus on the entire transport-chain rather
than a process-oriented focus on the rail trip
itself. Policy-makers should support and
stimulate this development by evaluating rail
operators based on a more comprehensive set
of performance indicators.
42
NOTES
1. For further details about EU rail policy in
recent years see the paper by Holvad in this issue.
Information about the environmental performance
of rail compared to other modes is also available
in this Issue in the paper by Banister, Brand and
Givoni.
2. In the literature, 0.4 is the most frequently
used cut-off point.
3. In the spirit of PCA, we draw mainly on
the analysis results, but leave some room for
theoretical considerations, in order to ensure a
classification structure that makes sense from a
statistical as well as a theoretical point of view.
In the present analysis, the assignment procedure
leads to a theoretically plausible and transparent
classification. In only three cases, when factor
loadings were just above or below the cut-off
point of 0.40, we used theoretical considerations
to overrule the assignment procedure. After all
elements are assigned to one or more factors, the
factors are labelled such that the factor label is
representative for the elements assigned to it.
4. Note that the accessibility variable used here
represents mainly aspects of accessibility at the
station and does not include certain other aspects
that are typically associated with accessibility
such as the distance, travel time or travel costs to
the station.
5. More precisely, the overall satisfaction score
is assumed to be a weighted average of the
satisfaction scores of each of the ten observed
individual dimensions plus an unknown number
of unobserved dimensions.
6. In order to derive the weights, we estimate a
linear regression analysis of the overall satisfaction
with the rail journey on the ten dimensions shown
in figure 1. In doing so, we control for general
individual characteristics such as gender, age and
residential location as well as for domain-specific
individual characteristics such as trip purpose,
travel frequency, car ownership and ticket type.
7. Note that satisfaction and perceived importance of a dimension may be directly related for
the following reason. Dimensions that passengers
are moderately satisfied with may draw less
attention than dimensions that receive a low or
very high satisfaction score, and may therefore
receive a lower weight. This would suggest a Ushaped relationship between satisfaction score
and estimated importance. While a two-order
polynomial trend line, fitted on the ten data points
in figure 3, indeed displays such a U-shape, the
BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 35 NO 1
IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF THE DOOR-TO-DOOR RAIL JOURNEY: A CUSTOMER-ORIENTED APPROACH
number of data points is insufficient to draw any
meaningful conclusions.
8. We do not discuss the differences between
groups of travellers with different trip purposes,
different times of the day during which they travel,
different ticket types Las these categorizations
overlap to a large degree with the categorization
based on travel frequency, e.g. the group of
frequent travellers consists to a large degree of
commuters with a monthly or yearly travel pass
who travel during peak hours.
9. Note that the negative value for personnel
seems unintuitive from a theoretical point of view,
as the interpretation would be that a higher
satisfaction with it decreases the overall satisfaction. The usual explanation is that the negative
variables may be reflective of some other variables that are not measured by the research. See
also figure 7.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research is carried out as part of the
TRANSUMO project ‘Reliability of Transport
Chains’. We would like to thank the Netherlands
Railways (NS) for providing us with the data.
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