Road-based public transportation in urban areas of Indonesia: What policies do users expect to improve the service quality?

• Relationships between users' dissatisfactions, unpleasant experiences and policy supports.
• Case study from three urban areas of Indonesia: Jakarta, Bandung and Yogyakarta.
• One's policy support is influenced by his/her past experience, preferences, and needs.
• The unique characteristics of each urban area need to be taken into account in policy design.

This study investigates the relationship between road-based public transport users' preferences and expectations of particular levels of support and their support of a set of improvement policy scenarios in Indonesia. A series of structural equation modelling estimations was carried out, using empirical surveys among road-based public transportation users in three major urban areas: Jakarta, Bandung and Yogyakarta. The results show that negative experience, service importance and dissatisfaction are factors that significantly correlate with the user preferences in accepting improvement policies along with fare adjustment. The users' travel behaviours and their socio-demographic characteristics were also found to be significant in influencing the degree of such support. However, the results also show discrepancies in the influence of key determinants across the three studied cities, which indicates a need for locally designed approaches.