Full name: Huynh Thi Kim Ngan

Thesis Title: A FACTOR ANALYSIS FOR BUS CHOICE BASED ON STRUCTURAL EQUATION MODELING – A CASE STUDY OF HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM

Supervisor: Professor Kazushi Sano

In Vietnam, the increased usage of personal vehicles has made huge pressure on transport infrastructure and the urban environment.
How to improve traffic congestion is a challenging question in big cities such as Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). 
To develop strategic plans, guidelines for policy makers and public transportation participants, 
this research intends to examine the service quality of city bus in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) while taking into account psychological factors of passengers. 
Understanding users' perceptions, satisfaction and the relationship between satisfaction and intention to use bus considering the psychological factors in HCMC context are essential to improving bus service quality and satisfying requirements for users. 
A questionnaire survey was conducted in HCMC. 
The questionnaire consists of four parts: Personal data, Travel information, Passengers' perception, Passengers' expectation on a scale of 1-5 (5 means “strongly agree” to 1 means “strongly disagree”) to evaluate passengers’ opinions.
The impact of four latent factors - Comfort, Convenience, Safety, 
and Time on perception as well as the interrelationship between perceptions were considered while measuring satisfaction and intention using SEM. 
The result model of perceptions data show that Comfortable has a substantial role, followed by Time, Safety, 
and Convenience respectively and there was a little statistically significant association between “Satisfaction” and “Intention” 
as well as a positive significant relationship between “Perceptions” and “Satisfaction”. 
The findings showed that “Satisfaction” had little influence on the respondents' “Intention” to choose bus as their commuting. 
This result may imply that, in the context of HCMC, just enhancing bus service and boosting customer happiness would not greatly affect citizens' decisions to use bus. 
This study accretes knowledge on assessing passengers’ perceptions of bus service quality, 
which considering the significant role of demographic characteristics and trip characteristics. 
The use of this approach gives authorities and operating businesses useful information to formulate policies, especially for various groups of users and potential users of bus transportation,
helping to enhance service quality and draw a variety of passengers to public transportation generally.