Five years down the line: did anything change for public transport interchange users?

Abstract

A crucial step in the process of determining more concrete notions concerning the ideal Public Transport Interchange (PTI) is to gain tangible information from the users of users of the PTI themselves. Five years ago, a descriptive survey and structured questionnaires with face-to-face interviews were administered to a sample population of 1055 passengers at six destination PTI's in the Cape Metropolitan Area. These findings were presented and published at numerous occasions. In the past few years, the City of Cape Town has initiated a series of public transport interchange upgrade projects. One of the significant examples that are included in both surveys is the Claremont PTI upgrade. To encourage student involvement in a real life project, the potential of revitalising and repeating the survey of five years ago became one of the research focuses in the department. The primary purpose of this survey, as with the previous one, was to determine the perceptions of PTI users regarding the public transport interchange environment and by doing so; a better understanding of the existing performance failures from their perspective will be gained. Secondary to this, the opportunity to do a before upgrade and after upgrade study and to determine end-user satisfaction levels, was identified.