Improving the Quality of the Door-to-Door Rail Journey: A Customer-Oriented Approach

Transcription

1 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 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 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 30 BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 35 NO 1

2 IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF THE DOOR-TO-DOOR RAIL JOURNEY: A CUSTOMER-ORIENTED APPROACH 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, BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 35 NO 1 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 31

3 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 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 Age <20 yrs; yrs; >60 yrs characteristics Gender Female; Male Usual departure station Within the Randstad; not within the Randstad Domain-specific individual Car availability Car available; no car available characteristics Travel purpose Work or education; business; leisure Travel timing Mostly during peak hours; mostly during offpeak hours; Both Travel frequency Less than 4 times per year; between 4 times per year and once per week; more than once per week Ticket Ticket without discount; ticket with discount; weekly, monthly or yearly ticket 32 BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 35 NO 1

4 IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF THE DOOR-TO-DOOR RAIL JOURNEY: A CUSTOMER-ORIENTED APPROACH 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 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 Travel comfort 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 Travel time reliability Station overview Station organisation and information Signage at station Travel information at station Cleanliness of station Protection against wind, rain and cold Connections with other trains Service schedule Service frequency of the trains Information available at home Intelligibility of audio messages at the station Dynamic information 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 Price-quality ratio Guarded bicycle parking Accessibility Unguarded bicycle parking Connections with public transport Car parking capacity Train taxi Possibilities to buy a ticket Ticket service 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 Personal safety during night time at station Personal safety in the train Approachability of service personnel Personnel Friendliness of service personnel Approachability of train conductor Friendliness of train conductor BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 35 NO 1 33

5 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 accessibility 4 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) 34 BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 35 NO 1

6 IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF THE DOOR-TO-DOOR RAIL JOURNEY: A CUSTOMER-ORIENTED APPROACH 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 BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 35 NO 1 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 35

7 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. 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 36 BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 35 NO 1

8 IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF THE DOOR-TO-DOOR RAIL JOURNEY: A CUSTOMER-ORIENTED APPROACH 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) BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 35 NO 1 37

9 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) 38 BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 35 NO 1

10 IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF THE DOOR-TO-DOOR RAIL JOURNEY: A CUSTOMER-ORIENTED APPROACH 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 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 Satisfaction, Importance and Impact of Dimensions of the Rail journey: Developments between The analysis in the previous sections was based on a set of 17,986 observations covering the years 2001 to 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 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) BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 35 NO 1 39

11 RAILWAYS IN EUROPE: A NEW ERA? Figure 7. Development of the satisfaction and importance of dimensions of the rail journey in the period (N = 1,131 for 2001; N = 3,712 for 2005) have two data points. A closed black circle indicates the satisfaction and importance in An open circle indicates the satisfaction and importance in 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 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 40 BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 35 NO 1

12 IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF THE DOOR-TO-DOOR RAIL JOURNEY: A CUSTOMER-ORIENTED APPROACH 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 The results showed that satisfaction has increased for almost all BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 35 NO 1 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 41

13 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. 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 U- shaped 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 42 BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 35 NO 1

14 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. REFERENCES Brons, M.R.E. and Rietveld, P. (2007) Betrouwbaarheid en klanttevredenheid in de OVketen: een statistische analyse (Reliability and customer satisfaction in the public transport chain: a statistical analysis). Research report for the Transumo project: Betrouwbaarheid van Transportketens. Brons, M.R.E., Givoni, M. and Rietveld, P. (2008) Access to railway stations and its potential in increasing rail use. Submitted to: Transportation Research A. European Commission (2001), White paper. European transport policy for 2010: time to decide. COM (2001) 370 final, Brussels. Gordon, I. (2003) Measuring customer relationships: what gets measured really does get managed. IVEY Business Journal Reprint 9B03TD02. IVEY management services. Gustafsson, A. and Johnson, M.D. (2004) Determining attribute importance in a service satisfaction model. Journal of Service Research, 7, pp Hair, J.F., Anderson, R.E., Tatham, R.L. and Black, W.C. (1998) Multivariate Data Analysis, 5th ed. Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Kotler, P. (2001) Principles of Marketing. Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. MuConsult BV (2002) De kwaliteit van de reis met de trein. (The quality of the rail journey). Schreurs, L. (2005) Klanttevredenheidonderz oek Nederlandse Spoorwegen. Een onderzoeksmatige toetsing van de kwaliteit en de onafhankelij kheid van het klanttevredenhei donderzoek van NS. (Customer satisfaction survey of the Dutch Railways). Carried out by order of Ministerie van Verkeer en Waterstaat, Rijkswaterstaat, Adviesdienst Verkeer en Vervoer, Sartorius OBA. 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. BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 35 NO 1 43