The Key Factors of Promoting Bike-share in Taiwan: Application of Importance-performance Analysis and Kano Model

Abstract

The concept of sustainable transportation has been gradually gaining government attention worldwide because unsurprising excessive greenhouse gases lead to negative impact on the environment when modern people enjoy the convenience of fossil fuel-based transportation Currently bike-share is regarded as the last milestone of sustainable transportation Although bike-share has been implemented for several years it has led to specific regional concerns for users In this study a research model pertaining to bike-share systems in Taiwan is designed with six constructs: bike station density bike hardware bike software use environment rental fee and operational factors In order to discover the key factors underlying the promotion of bike-share an importance-performance analysis (IPA) is applied to measure user satisfaction Meanwhile the Kano model is used to classify bike-share attributes The empirical data were acquired using an online questionnaire In total there were 612 respondents who participated in this survey (with 612 usable questionnaire) The descriptive analysis revealed that female respondents use bike-share more than males Youbike accounts for the highest usage of bike-share and in an age range from 20-29 are the most common bike-share users User satisfaction and service performance was measured using the IPA The results demonstrated that bike station density bike software and operational factors are the key factors of related to promoting bike-share in Taiwan In addition the use environment needs immediate attention on the part of operators to improve the current service quality and thus it is considered to be as a key factor On the other hand bike hardware in quadrant III (low importance and low performance) and rental fee in quadrant IV (low importance and high performance) were not key factors based on this model design The Kano model was employed to classify the bike-share quality attributes The Kano model demonstrated that the first operational item (the bike-share should provide a sufficient number of bicycles) is a significant key factor related to both attractiveness and satisfaction with performance To summarize there has to date been no overall investigation of bike-share in Taiwan However in this study general research is conducted in order to add specific contribution to the current literature Although the defects in the questionnaire and the limitations in the Kano model caused most attributes to be insignificant these issues did not affect the IPA results In the research limitations it is suggested that a directly-asked-question (DAQ) approach used to refine the original questionnaire items in the Kano model in order to obtain more robust results Overall the key factors proposed in this study are valid and objective so any operator managing a bike-share system should take these factors into consideration Keywords: Bike-share Sustainable transportation Importance-performance analysis (IPA) Kano model key factor

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English
Supervisor	Chun-Hsiung Liao (Supervisor)