Identifying the factors affecting users' safety at bus stops: A step towards improving bus ridership

Abstract

Urban sprawl has created uncontrolled vehicle growth, and achieving sustainable mobility in road transport has become a challenge. The study focuses on safety, one of the pillars of sustainable transport. Improving public transport safety is essential to enhance ridership. Ranking of different factors such as travel comfort, safety, timeliness of the buses, distance travelled, and travel time based on their priorities affecting the mode choice has concluded that safety has the second most priority, and travel distance has the least priority for bus ridership. The study also investigated the suitability of online and field surveys to measure the perceived safety of travellers at bus stops. The results recommend that field surveys are more reliable than online surveys, which fail to capture the field reality in different aspects. The safety measured directly on a five-point scale could not give valuable information on the traveller's safety perception. Therefore, the study identified the indicators capable of measuring the perceived safety of travellers at bus stops. Safety is taken as a second-order latent construct, and the hierarchical confirmatory factor analysis was carried out. The results found that safety derived from five latent variables, namely bus stop facility, bus stop location, bus operator behaviour, other users' behaviour, and pedestrian facility, is a systematic approach to measure overall perceived safety at the bus stop. Adding night lighting, taking precautions against left-side overtaking and inappropriate bus stopping, avoiding bus stops at curves and intersections, and ensuring improved sidewalk amenities could all increase the perceived safety for a bus user. © 2025 selection and editorial matter, Sreevalsa Kolathayar, N Vinod Chandra Menon and Sreekeshava K S. All rights reserved.