Investigating the impact of COVID-19 on user perception for deriving policies and intervention areas for urban bus service in India

The paper aims to investigate the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the perception of travelers and identify new policies and intervention areas for improving urban bus service. This was carried out based on the perception data collected from travelers in the years 2018 (before pandemic) and 2020(in post lockdown scenario). Data was collected from the state of Kerala, India, and Importance-Satisfaction Analysis (ISA) with fuzzy c-means clustering was carried out to identify improvement areas for both scenarios. Results show a substantial increase in the number of priority areas as compared to the pre-pandemic scenario. Bus service attributes such as cleanliness, crowding level, and pedestrian environment emerged as new intervention areas of bus service during the pandemic. This is a clear reflection of the increased awareness of travelers about the prevailing pandemic scenario and the need for improvement in attributes related to social distancing and hygiene. The higher priority to information related attributes of bus service clearly shows the need for improvement in such attributes for the safe planning of trips during the pandemic. The work also estimated desired service levels of quantitative attributes to enhance the satisfaction levels of users. An evaluation of five bus routes in Kochi based on the desired levels shows the underperformance of attributes such as headway, punctuality, and crowding level. While the findings are city-specific, the methodology and experience may be adopted to enhance the service quality of buses and other public transport.