A study on the prospects of school bus services in Hong Kong

Abstract

School bus services play an important role in transporting students to and from schools. However, there has been an increasing concern in the inadequate supply of school bus services and increase of school bus fares in recent years. There has been substantial research undertaken on the school bus routing problem, but no known empirical research has focused on evaluating the service quality of school bus services and modelling children's school travel mode related to school buses. This study aimed to examine the impact of school bus service attributes on parents’ satisfaction and to identify the factors influencing the parental choice of a school bus. Our survey using a self-administrative questionnaire provided quantitative data from 746 parents of kindergarten and primary school students. An importance-performance analysis was adopted to determine improvement priorities for the thirteen attributes of school bus services. Our results demonstrated that respondents considered the service quality of school bus operators as the top priority for improvement. The journey time, school bus fares and school bus routing were also needed for immediate improvement actions. Moreover, a stated-preference survey was also conducted in this study. A multinomial logit model was developed to investigate the behaviour of parents in choosing appropriate school buses. Results showed that seating capacity of school bus, journey time, school bus fare, walking time from home to school bus stop, combining students from different schools and the use of interchange stops influenced the decision of the parents. This study also illustrated that it is possible to use single school buses to pick-up students from different schools and set up interchange stops at the intersections of routes. However, this option is only accepted by parents if school bus fares and journey time can be substantially reduced. As a result of these investigations, five policy implications: (i) school bus fare subsidy scheme, (ii) flexible school hours to kindergartens and primary schools, (iii) mandatory bus policy to school districts with serious traffic congestion, (iv) designated interchange stops for school bus riders and (v) provision of new technology for school bus services were suggested to improve the service quality of school bus services and to cope with increasing demand of school bus services.