The Quality of Sustainable Public Transport as a Determinant of Behavioral Change Among Private Car Users in Urban Areas

The study examines the impact of the quality of sustainable public transport on the satisfaction and willingness of private car users to realize their mobility needs by using public transport, through the prism of the pull attributes of the quality of sustainable public transport and the factors that enhance its impact, and above all, the push measures of transport policy, which ultimately lead to the improvement of sustainable urban mobility. The research was conducted on a sample of 440 car users in the City of Kragujevac, Republic of Serbia, utilizing a Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) framework. The results show that accessibility is the most significant pull attribute of public transport quality, that safety and comfort should not be observed separately, and that the contribution of intramodality as a pull attribute of public transport quality depends on the context in which public transport is implemented. The results also show that the impact of public transport quality on satisfaction is stronger than on the behavioral intentions of private car users. Furthermore, they show that push measures of transport policy amplify the impact of public transport quality on private car users' satisfaction with using public transport, but do not affect the impact of public transport quality on behavioral intentions. Due to operational constraints, it was not possible to examine the role of environmental awareness as a moderating factor in the relationship between public transport quality and satisfaction, nor between public transport quality and behavioral intentions of private car users.