Examining Social and Safety Dimensions in Public Transport

Abstract

Public transport plays a key role in urban mobility. However, its trustworthiness and usage have been reduced by factors such as perceived insecurity, rising incidents of gender-based violence, limited reporting avenues, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This decline in confidence for public transport has resulted in increased traffic congestion, heightened emissions, diminished social cohesion, and increased the lack of citizens to support it. To overcome these challenges, it is imperative to evaluate public transport services from the point of passengers and other various stakeholders. Therefore, an approach is necessary to engage public authorities and transport operators’ involvement as well as passengers’ empirically grounded insights into the quality of public transport services. This paper aims to present a comprehensive framework for the assessment of the social, safety and security dimensions of public transport. It adopts a comprehensive, multi-pronged, and multi-stakeholder methodology. Therefore, it gains invaluable insights into the performance of public transport services, empowering decision-makers to make well-informed choices regarding future enhancements and investments. Importantly, this framework emphasizes on the significance of social, safety and security elements as perceived by passengers, shedding light on their intrinsic value in public transport.