Stakeholder perspective on urban transport system service quality Shu-Mei Wang a* , Cheng-Min Feng b and Cheng-Hsien Hsieh b a Department of Tourism, Shih Hsin University, Taipei, Taiwan; b Institute of Traffic and Transportation, National Chiao Tung University, Taipei, Taiwan Different transport stakeholders have different needs for transport infrastructure and services. Achieving stakeholder satisfaction implies a total quality management (TQM) that continuously improves service quality. However, few studies have discussed service quality in relation to urban transport systems. This study proposes an instrument based on SERVQUAL for measuring urban transport service quality from a stakeholder perspective. The proposed instrument is developed and tested through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The gaps between stakeholder expectations and actual received and the gaps associated with stakeholders’ expectations and the perceptions of these expectations by professionals are examined. Importance-performance analysis is used to construct a service attribute evaluation map for determining resource allocation to improve service quality. The application is illustrated through an empirical study to discuss the managerial implications in the Taipei metropolitan area. The analytical results reveal the existence of gaps and that stakeholders are more concerned with reliability and safety dimensions. Keywords: instrument; service quality; gap analysis; importance-performance analysis Introduction Transport systems consist of infrastructure, modes and stakeholders. Needs for transport infrastructure and services differ between transport stakeholders. Although most transport services are provided by the public sector, the service levels of transport systems have increased substantially around the world over the last 20 years, particularly in metropolitan areas of developed countries, due to a shift towards a culture of requiring that the perform- ance of government should be as efficient as that of the private businesses. This raises con- cerns regarding maintaining transport quality in the face of changing social and lifestyle patterns that are generating increasingly diverse travel needs. Policy-makers cannot simply create services, provide them, and hope for the best. To decide how to improve the service quality of transport systems, policy-makers must first understand how stake- holders view their services via valid measuring instruments to effectively measure user reactions to those services (Carr, 2007). Currently, SERVQUAL, developed by Parasura- man, Zeithaml, and Berry (1988), is the dominant instrument for measuring stakeholder reactions in the service domain and a useful tool for making overall assessments of service quality (Saravanan & Rao, 2007). Numerous studies have discussed service quality in transport industries. Nathanail (2008) addressed service quality for railway passengers, qualitative studies of bus users were presented to improve the understanding of traveller attitudes regarding public ISSN 1478-3363 print/ISSN 1478-3371 online # 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14783363.2010.529329 http://www.informaworld.com * Corresponding author. Email: wsm@cc.shu.edu.tw Total Quality Management Vol. 21, No. 11, November 2010, 1103–1119