NOTTINGHAM BUS FARE SURVEY DESIGN.
BACKGROUND.
This questionnaire was developed to measure the efficiency and convenience of the City of Nottingham’s Bus Network Fare and Ticketing systems. This was a solo project, where I designed, piloted, and implemented a questionnaire to ascertain the affect that various forms of ticket payment had on rider’s attitudes and usage of public transportation.
Timeline: 1 week.
RESEARCH.
In recent years, the transport industry has moved towards introducing more opportunities to pay for fares, including contactless fare collection systems (CFCS) without the need for any form of refillable transit card or traditional ticketing systems. Previously, CFCS were dominated by monolithic single suppliers with costs that proved to be a high barrier of entry for smaller transit networks. (Budrin, 2019) However, in recent years modular systems were introduced, where smaller transit companies can pick and choose smaller modules from select suppliers and use them to build operable CFCS quickly without the need to buy everything from a larger single supplier. Due to these new opportunities, many cities have seen large growth in CFCS usage year over year. (McGavock, 2022) The purpose of this questionnaire is to evaluate the usage, convenience, and public attitude towards CFCS, due to its relatively recent and widespread adoption across the globe. The reason behind investigating the convenience of CFCS, is because these many varied and different systems create many varied and different usage methods, and riders are expected to adapt to all of it, which can create instances of what Zalar (2018) referred to as ‘resistances’ or moments of frustration which can discourage potential and existing passengers from using public transportation.
RESULTS.
The questionnaire would be completed online, on a mobile phone with a camera, as the link to the questionnaire would be a QR code on bus stops, and the interior of buses. Questionnaires take time to complete, and the act of waiting for a bus, or on the bus waiting for your stop provides a suitable amount of time where focus can be placed on something like a short questionnaire. The length of the questionnaire was also an important consideration, as the time spent on or waiting for a bus is not long enough to complete a longer questionnaire, so the length had to be balanced between the richness of possible responses and time taken to complete. A link to submit the questionnaire would be provided at the end. Data collected would be within-subjects and contain a mix of qualitative and quantitative data. Quantitative data would be analyzed with descriptive statistics like Chi-Square. Qualitative data would be analyzed for content, such as keywords, subjects or concepts that are similar, and the number would be quantified as frequency data which could then be analyzed using Chi-Square. The IV’s would be method of payment, frequency of bus travel, and transit provider. The DV would be perceived inconvenience or ‘resistance’.