Exploring first impressions of public transport services through a university access survey

Attracting and retaining public transport ridership is challenging. People's actual experiences and attitudes about public transport are not well understood. First impressions have repeatedly been shown to be integral to attitude development in psychology studies due to a phenomenon called the 'primacy effect'. However this concept has never been applied to the transport context. This paper examines first impressions through a university access survey. The research seeks to better understand unfamiliar trips on public transport services in terms of when they occur, how important they are to patrons, and what experiences they are characterised by. The results suggest that unfamiliar trips on public transport are important to the development of attitudes related to public transport and that the trips themselves are more negative than familiar trips. Furthermore first trips and attitudes about public transport are shown to be significant to mode choice as measured by subsequent public transport usage for those with access to a car but not for captive public transport users. Though the latter disaggregate analysis had relatively small sample sizes. Suggestions are then offered regarding future research, and how the findings could be applied to the transport planning context.