SURVEY DESIGN TO GRASP AND COMPARE USER'S ATTITUDES ON BUS RAPID TRANSIT (BRT) IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

In mitigating urban transportation problems and providing a sustainable transit system, rail-based systems have become popular. While rail-based systems are welcome in many developed countries, it is impractical for cities in developing countries due to the high cost of system building and operation. Thus, a staged or incremental adjustment towards fixed guide way transit implementation of greater interest to many agencies today, and these days it has started developing in terms of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). As it is very new to developing cities, it is a challenge to get the users to understand the system and to grasp their attitude. Besides, there are many other general issues like literacy, lack of a sample frame etc. Survey design needs to be tuned carefully for these cities to obtain a resonant output. Concerning all these problems, a hypothetical questionnaire survey such as Stated Preference (SP) has become popular. This study conducted a survey on BRT implementation with SP as a hypothetical tool at a selected corridor in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. The main objectives were to identify questionnaire design(media) effects, literacy of users, segmental variation, and the important variable(s). In this survey design, system explanation has been set in two slightly different ways (media: TEXT ∼ IMAGE) for comparison and it was found that even a slight difference on design affected the users' response considerably. Income level could not be predicted directly, but car ownership was found to be a good predictor, it was found to be an important variable and it showed a correlation with literacy.