The Impact Of Travel Well-being On Intention To Reuse Bus

Since 2012,China has begun to implement the public transport priority strategy.Fifteen cities including Beijing have been selected as the first batch of cities to be built in the "bus metropolis" construction demonstration project.Many cities are continuing to expand the conventional bus network,but the passenger flow of it continues to decline,and the bottleneck of the growth of bus share rate is difficult to break through.The current indexes of bus assessment system focus too much on the scale of facilities,the speed of road network,traffic congestion index and other factors,which cannot fully meet travelers’ needs for high-quality travel services.In order to build a "people-oriented" bus travel system,not only should overall satisfaction of bus travel service be taken into consideration,but also the emotions during bus travel should be paid attention.This paper explores the mechanism of the impact of travel well-being on the willingness to reuse bus,in order to improve the use rate of it.Firstly,this paper designed a questionnaire to collect data about the travel characteristics,perceived service quality,travel well-being,reuse intention and individual characteristics of the conventional bus passengers in Beijing.Then,three dimensions of travel well-being(cognitive satisfaction,two dimensions of travel emotions)were used as dependent variables to establish multiple linear regression equations.The common and the different influencing factors of the three dimensions were explored.Consequently,based on the utility maximization theory and S-O-R model,this paper constructed a conceptual model to explore the relationship among bus perception service quality,travel well-being and the reuse intention of bus.And then PLS-SEM structural equation model was established using data of 721 valid questionnaires.The results demonstrate that,from the perspective of the influencing factors of travel well-being,demographic variables and trip characteristics have a greater impact on travel emotions,but have a smaller impact on cognitive satisfaction.Specifically,education level,disposable monthly income,occupation,travel purpose and activities during the trip only affect the travel emotions.The influencing factors of cognitive satisfaction involve all aspects of bus travel chain,while the influencing factors of travel emotions are mostly related to travel time performance.The negative emotions of bus travel mainly include the tiredness caused by long waiting time and total travel time,as well as nervousness about unpunctuality of arriving time.From the results of PLS-SEM,cognitive satisfaction and travel emotions both have a positive impact on the intention to reuse bus,but the impact path is different.Cognitive satisfaction has a direct impact on the intention to reuse bus,but the two dimensions of travel emotions mainly indirectly impact the intention to reuse bus by firstly affecting cognitive satisfaction.Based on the results of empirical research,this paper puts forward suggestions to improve travel well-being of bus and passengers’ intentions to reuse bus from the government level.It is meaningful to improve the using proportion of conventional bus among all travel modes,develop the priority strategy of public transit,and build a “people-oriented” bus travel system.