The growth of literature in the field of quality of service in the public transport (PT) sector shows increasing concern for a better understanding of the factors affecting service quality (SQ) in PT organizations and companies. A large variety of approaches to SQ have been developed in recent years owing to the complexity of the concept; the broad range of attributes required to evaluate SQ; and the imprecision, subjectivity, and heterogeneous nature of the data used to analyze it. Most of these approaches are based on customer satisfaction surveys. This paper seeks to summarize the evolution of research and current thinking as it relates to the different methodological approaches for SQ evaluation in the PT sector over the years and to provide a discussion of future directions.

Knowing passengers’ behavioural intentions to use transit service can be a useful support for transit managers and marketers who can define the most convenient strategies to satisfy existing passengers and attract new ones. We retain that analysing passengers’ intentions to continue to use transit services in the future together with relevant concepts such as service quality and customer satisfaction is fundamental to understand passengers’ behaviour. For this reason, in this paper we propose a structural equation model for investigating on the relationship among some aspects influencing passengers’ behavioural intentions towards the use of transit services. The light rail transit (LRT) of Seville (Spain) offers the transit service supporting our work. We collected through an ad-hoc survey the opinions of the passengers about the used LRT system and transit system in general, and we propose a methodology to explain how passengers’ opinions influence their intentions to use the LRT again. Among the interesting findings from the model, we observe that behavioural intentions are mostly affected by passengers’ judgements about LRT service quality and their satisfaction with the service. Moreover, not only direct but indirect effects on behavioural intentions are derived, determining an accurate conclusion about the relationships of the other concepts with LRT’ users behavioural intentions.