Establishing service quality interrelations for Metro rail transit: Does gender really matter?

The study on gender disparity in service quality (SQ) interrelations of public transit can provide gender-specific improvement measures to transit officials in attracting new passengers and increase patronage. In the presence of minimal knowledge basis on gender disparity in SQ interrelations, this study fills the gap by applying an integrated Bayesian Networks (BN) and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) on perception data of 1504 male and 745 female passengers of Delhi Metro. The study findings reveal that males consider passenger ease, whereas females consider service availability as most influential factors in explaining overall SQ. Females are less concerned about passenger ease and seamless connectivity, as compared to males. Further, gender-based importance-performance analysis has highlighted that Delhi Metro must consider ‘safety and security’ as most crucial factor to improve its services. Overall, this study demonstrates the necessity of gender-specific strategic measures to help transit officials in allocating resources efficiently