Service Quality Assessment of App-Based Demand-Responsive Public Transit Services in Lahore, Pakistan
, Nazam Ali 1, Syed Arif Hussain Shah 2,3, Muhammad Ashraf Javid 4 and Tiziana Campisi 5,*Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The article is quite well written, has a good structure and a clear procedure.
I recommend adding to the abstract a short methodology of the survey and its processing and at the same time shorten the published results of the survey in the abstract.
The article lacks a brief description of SWVL and Airlift (the comparison of them) .
In the article, some facts are repeated, eg lines 217-219 and 243-245.
Figure 2 is illegible.
It is not clear from the content of the article, whether the composition of the respondents corresponds to the composition of passengers who normally use the SWVL and Airlift services. I would recommend adding it to the discussion.
Author Response
Dear reviewer thanks for your suggestions
Author Response File: 
Author Response.doc
Reviewer 2 Report
The study is well done, well organized, and mostly well written, with just some minor editing needed. I have a few questions and comments, which are provided below.
SWVL and Airlift are referred to as demand responsive services, but they have fixed routes with fixed stops. Can you describe how these services are different from fixed-route services? How are they demand responsive?
Bottom of page 6/page 7 - Can you say whether the survey respondents are representative of the target population - mostly young and male?
Is there any speculation regarding the different results found for the two services, as shown in Tables 3 and 4? For example, some attributes are shown in Table 3 but not 4, and vice versa. Is there a possible explanation for that?
Similarly, is there a possible explanation for why the results of the ordinal regressions differ between the two services? Why did the model fit the data well for choice A but not choice B? Why would the factors be significant for predicting satisfaction with choice A but not choice B? Why would the middle income group be more likely to be satisfied with overall service than the low income group for choice B? For choice A, the low income group was more likely to be satisfied, and a reasonable explanation was given to explain this result, but this result was not found for choice B, so I am wondering if there could be a possible explanation for that.
Page 14, lines 483-487: The text states that "the ordinal model for choice B fitted the data well," but does this not contradict line 427 that states "the model does not do a good job at explaining the variations in the data"? The text also states that "an improvement in service-attributes was again found to have an increase in overall satisfaction with choice B." Do the results show this? The estimated coefficient for service attributes is found to be insignificant.
The last paragraph talks a little bit about the implications and applications of this research, but I wonder if this could be expanded upon some. For example, how would this research help in developing appropriate policies for demand responsive transit, and what would those policies look like?
Can you say anything more about the contribution of this research, beside the fact that it is first conducted in Lahore?
Author Response
Dear reviewer thanks for your suggestions
Author Response File: Author Response.doc
