Qualidades medida e percebida no sistema de transporte coletivo por ônibus: estudo de caso de Belo Horizonte

Abstract

In Brazil, the buses are the main transit mode in most cities, despite of the steady growth of the private car fleet. It´s one of the most bindable modes to the population, as many people use transit as a necessity and, due to it, it has a crucial role to Brazil´s cities urban mobility and sustainability, and must have a high degree of quality and efficiency. The managers of the Public Transit Systems must offer high quality services, promoting the appropriate conditions so as the customers could commute. Otherwise, when the users´ needs are neglected, the results are usually a loss of transit´s market share, with the migration of those travelers for the individual modes or the paratransit. Focusing over the users´ needs, expectations and perceptions, beyond the enforcement of those indexes related to service planning, attendance and control, is the most adequate manner for the effectuation of bus transit quality levels. As this quality degree could only achieve the ideal baseline when it meets the always growing customers´ expectations, it is extremely important that they could be frequently precisely registered, being the most viable way of effectuation of this procedure the appropriate use of the complaints and other service feedbacks, made by transit users´ through the channels provided by the many different transit authorities that exist in Belo Horizonte. The actual gap between the customers´ needs, expectations and perceptions about the service´s value chain attributes and the real quality level of the offered service, must be continuously verified, orienting, in this way, the endless search towards the improvement in service. The present dissertation has as a main goal to establish case comparisons that enables the verification of the resemblance of measure parameters of the service´s quality levels, nominated in this study as Measured Quality and Perceived Quality, and the designation of the last being developed through the study of users´ complaints and feedbacks. It was used methodology designed for the quality evaluation of bus transit services through technical parameters and criteria. This method is easy to use and enables comparisons between equitable ways of the users´ expressions. The case study considers, in the evaluation of measured quality, the bus transit system operational data, and, for the perceived quality evaluation, the secondary database and information related to customer´s expressions, both extracted in the first ten day period of march 2012, and provided by the Empresa de Transporte e Trânsito de Belo Horizonte S/A (BHTRANS). The results show the sufficiency in the used method´s application for comparisons between the measured and the perceived quality levels, and the found numbers suggests similarities between them.