Understanding post-COVID-19 hierarchy of public transit needs: Exploring relationship between service attributes, satisfaction, and loyalty

Introduction and objective:COVID-19 transforms travel behavior and undermines public transit (PT) operations even though the disease is under control. PT recovery partly requires instruments to prioritize service quality and satisfaction improvement based on travelers' transit needs. However, there is limited understanding of psychological needs for post-COVID-19 transit use and how the needs affect satisfaction and loyalty. Thus, this study explored the influences of postCOVID-19 psychological needs for bus service attributes on satisfaction and loyalty and thereby built a bus need hierarchy for riders in different use stages to distinguish critical service attributes from basic and excitement ones by applying Maslow's need hierarchy theory. Methods:A face-to-face questionnaire survey with systematic sampling collected data from 204 bus riders in Kaohsiung, which is a transit-developing city of Taiwan and whose PT ridership and service levels had drastically reduced because of the pandemic. Factor analysis was used to construct bus service attributes, and structural equation modeling was applied to analyze the influence of bus service attributes on overall satisfaction with and loyalty to bus services. Results:Results indicated that (1) riders included epidemic prevention needs in transit safety assessment and (2) pursued the needs for safety, reliability, and comfort to increase overall satisfaction and thereby form loyalty; and (3) safety and reliability were respectively critical needs of riders in the beginning and intermediate use stages, whereas comfort persisted in critical needs throughout all use stages. Conclusions:The findings implied the necessity of satisfying the needs for safety with epidemic prevention for initiating post-COVID-19 transit use and service quality improvement priorities for different PT use and system contexts. The implications can also be applied to future public health emergency management for PT administrators.