Passengers’ Intentions to Use Public Transport during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of Bangkok and Jakarta

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This research aims to identify effective COVID-19 policies that fit public health criteria and increase travel safety. The public buses and paratransit buses in Bangkok and Jakarta are the target groups. The research question consists of twofold: (1) how significant is the service quality variable on passengers’ intention to use public transportation during an academic? and (2) what are the effective countermeasures that could contribute to passenger confidence in using public transport during a pandemic? The questionnaire survey was carried out with 407 and 410 respondents in Bangkok and Jakarta, respectively. The IBM SPSS statistics 27 was used for exploratory factor analysis by using principal component extraction and varimax factor rotation. This research recommends increasing public interest in public transport (i.e., health efforts, tracing apps, and social distancing).

This research is well-written and organized. However, the research needs to improve some points so as to better the quality of the research.

1.   The researchers could include a hypothesis in the introduction section.

2.   What are the criteria to adopt Bangkok (i.e., Siam, Victory moment, and Mochit) and Jakarta (i.e., Kampung Rambutan Terminal, Lebak Bulus Terminal, and Sudirman) as study areas?

3.   The researchers could include information about transportation systems in study areas.

4.   According to the data collection, the researchers could deeply explain the strategic questionnaire surveys as shown below.

3.1 How many respondents did you ask in the questionnaire survey in each area?

3.2 Did you calculate the sample size before data collection? (If yes, please explain)

5.   Do you have any reference for levels of monthly income?

6.   Could you explain and analyze more clearly the policy implications in the discussion and conclusion?

7.   What is the limitation of this research?

Author Response

We want to thank the reviewers for their reviews and valuable suggestions. Please see the attachment for details.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

I have read carefully your document.

I found it quite interesting due to the info gathered as a result of the pandemic. However, I found a few issues along the text that for sure can be easily amended.

1.- Please double-check the redaction of the entire document.

2.- Instead of using loads of tables that nobody will read, my suggestion is to define them as plots where you can exploit whole the info that you gathered. Moreover, if you want to make the data available to further analysis, you can add it as a supplementary material.

3.- There are lots of ideas that are repeated along the text, if you pay enough attention you can reduce the length of it and improve the content.

4.- Figure 2 is a nice example, the main issue is that the caption does not reflect the quality of it, please improve it.

5.- Please specify the methodology that you used.

6.- Improve your discussion and conclusions. There are lots of ideas but not clarity.

Author Response

We want to thank the reviewers for their reviews and valuable suggestions. Please see the attachment for details.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf