User Satisfaction and Its Impacts on the Use of a Public Bicycle System Empirical Studies from Hangzhou, China

This research examined the evaluation of service quality in the public bicycle system (PBS) in Hangzhou, China, along with a measurement of user satisfaction, and of how an individual's perceived satisfaction influenced his or her PBS use. A 30-item PBS service quality scale was first developed and then applied to the empirical study of PBS service in Hangzhou. On the basis of a finally validated sample of 231 responses, an item-based PBS service quality assessment and an individual-based satisfaction assessment were obtained with a Rasch model. Thereafter, individual satisfaction was introduced as one of the explanatory variables in modeling PBS customers' frequency of use in a logistic regression approach. According to the analysis, environmental factors, such as nighttime illumination and shade along the bicycle way, and service factors, such as convenient withdrawal of the deposit, proper handling of customer complaints, and an increase in station density, were thought to be in most urgent need of improvement by the interviewed Hangzhou PBS users. The respondents tended to give positive marks to the PBS service in Hangzhou, with a quantitative measure of 1.49 +/- 0.31, in a range of [-7.74,7.89] [all in the log-odds unit (logit)]. The present work also proved that a one-unit increase in user-perceived satisfaction would increase the likelihood of a user's moving into a higher use-frequency level, as defined in the study, by almost 35%.