Evaluating the quality of services for bus performance in Alor Setars

Abstract

Traffic congestion is one of the issues raised as the development and urbanization moving forward. Bus services still considered as an public transport option to move from one location to another. Since 1957, bus services have been a primary selection not just a big cities like Kuala Lumpur and Georgetown as well as small town in like Alor Setar, Kota Bahru and others. As the demand increase year by year, the quality of service is expected to be improved as well. Recently, public transport in small cities in Malaysia also faced a huge competition with E-hailing services such as Grab and MyCar. Therefore, these paper is to determine the service quality of bus performance in Alor Setar, Kedah. These studies were conducted in April 2019. Service quality data have been taken at Terminal Shahab Perdana, Alor Setar. Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual (TCRPM) has been stated as a specific guidelines and key indicators to determine the quality service of bus performance in designated area. There were four specific areas would be focused in these studies such as service frequency, hours of service, factors of passenger load, on time performance. Based on the results, it shows that only passenger load factor has classified as A quality of service in these studies. The hours of services and on time performance were classified as Class D while the service frequency was classified as Class F. The overall quality of service in Alor Setar, Kedah is classified as Class D which consider as moderate as there is a lot of issues should be addressed. Some improvement on these three attributes should be made to increase the quality of service. Authorities also could use the outcome of these studies to determine and identifies the significant improvements for bus service on these areas.