Unhappy passengers

Users are dissatisfied with the services provided by the three public bus concessionaires in Macau, concludes research conducted as part of a master’s degree program in the MSAR. The results leave no room for doubt: “the overall quality of the public bus service is perceived as low. In general, all dimensions analysed by the author are rated below average,” the research reveals.
Even if the conclusions simply offer a more scientific version of what seems to be a common sense notion, the research made by Adriano Filipe Gaspar, and presented at the Polytechnic Institute of Macau last May, provides results that should not be ignored: more than 510,000 people use public buses every day (in the year 2015 a total of 197,229,121 passengers were transported on buses). This is in line with the Transport Bureau focusing its strategy on the “primacy of public transport” and on indirect efforts to reduce the use of individual private transport by the creation of an exclusive bus lane.
According to the Policy Address for the financial year 2016, highlights the researcher, traffic is one of the concerns of Macau residents that affects various elements of transportation including the efficiency of travel, road safety and the environment. The Address also points out that the government wants to begin studies on future bus services and to expand and implement exclusive public transport routes at certain times of the day.
But if the quality of service perceived by users is low, it will be more difficult to persuade other users to opt for the services of the three concessionaire companies.
And this is precisely what is demonstrated by the study – Perceived Quality by Public Bus Users of Macau (Qualidade Percebida pelos Utentes de Autocarros Públicos de Macau, in the original Portuguese version) available online.
The analysis concludes that: “the perception of the overall quality of public bus services is negative, highlighting the ‘Responsiveness’ dimension, since it is the dimension that presents the lowest perceived quality level of the service.”
Adriano Filipe Gaspar interviewed 387 users of public transport and analysed various criteria, from timetables to the image of buses, the training of drivers to the need of people to use them, and “in general, all dimensions have values lower than three on a seven-point scale.”
In fact, of the dozens of questions asked of the respondents, only one obtained a value of above four points: “Is the price of the fare adequate for bus services?” – which resulted in an average of 4.02 points out of a total seven possible points.

Some examples:
The question “How do you rate the overall quality of services provided by public bus service providers in Macau?” received an average score of 3.04 on the seven-point scale. “We can conclude that the users are dissatisfied with the service provided by the three concessionaires of public buses.”
The image of public buses also generated low values, with an average of 2.66 points.
When the author asked: “What suggestions do you consider relevant to propose for the improvement of the public buses services?” the category of “More training for drivers” was the most frequent response.
“This study intends to understand the quality of public bus services in Macau, thus contributing to a better understanding of this issue. The study could later be used as an aid in the definition of strategies by public transport companies and the MSAR Government,” suggests the author.