Perceived Attribute Importance in Public and Private Transportation

A group of 500 mail panel respondents rated attributes of two generic classes of innovative urban transportation systems on a seven-point importance scale. A factor analysis of the data resulted in seven interpretable factors to describe the variance of the 40 public transportation attributes and five factors to describe the variance of the 34 private transportation attributes. These latest dimensions of importance were shown via discriminant analyses to have relations to the socio-economic characteristics of the panel respondents. Discriminant analysis was also used to reveal perceptual differences between the two system alternatives with respect to 15 common attributes.