THESIS ABSTRACT

Abstract

Ride-sharing services in the Kathmandu Valley have become an essential alternative solution for public transportation. The rapidly increasing population, rapid urbanization, poor public transportation service, contributed to the increase popularity of ride-sharing services. This study focused on satisfaction level of both users, shift preference from two wheel to four-wheel ride sharing service and model developed for future preference shift. Primary data was collected through the structure questionnaire from ride sharing users in Kathmandu valley. This study compares the satisfaction levels of both two-wheel and four-wheel ride-sharing users based on key service quality dimension, including safety, comfort, fare charges, travel time, rider behavior, reliability, traffic congestion, and achievement of travel objectives. The findings indicated that both ride-sharing services achieved an overall high satisfaction level, with an RII value of 0.62 for two-wheel and 0.66 for four-wheel ride-sharing users. Travel time (0.76), objective achievement (0.74) and Fare charges (0.66) were the highest satisfaction factors. While comfort, safety, rider behavior, reliability, and traffic congestion shows moderate satisfaction levels. The evaluated value of four-wheel ride-sharing users shows high satisfaction, with comfort (RII=0.77), safety (0.73), and rider behavior (0.72) ranking as the most influential factors. Reliability, traffic congestion, travel time, and objective achievement also received positive influences. Fare charge (0.48) shows moderate satisfaction. The logistic regression analysis identifies key influencing factor of ride-sharing users for shift preference. The result show that age group (Exp(B)=8.763), comfort (Exp(B)=4.795), and safety (Exp(B)=3.416) have the strongest positive influence on user decisions. Income increase, weather condition, rider behavior, and reliability also positively affect ride-sharing shifting. Traffic impact (Exp(B)=0.553) shows a negative influence, social status and family user numbers are statistically insignificant. The findings indicated that user comfort, safety, and demographic factors play important roles in determining ride-sharing preferences.

Keywords

Ride-sharing service, Relative Importance Index(RII), Binary Logistic, Regression, mode shift, user satisfaction, user preference, two-wheel ride sharing, four-wheel ride sharing.