# User Satisfaction Survey on Public Transport by a New PAHP Based Model
## 4 Results of the Parsimonious AHP Survey
**Step 1:** Figure 2 demonstrates that we have applied 24 attributes structured into three levels to characterize the supply quality of public bus transportation. The respondents compared the importance of these attributes in terms of the necessity of their development. For a conventional AHP survey, the questionnaire would have contained the level wise and branch wise pair wise comparisons of all the elements of the decision structure by the values of the well-known Saaty-scale (from 1 to 9 to express superiority and from \(\frac{1}{2}\) to 1/9 to express inferiority). However, in our approach, the second level, which contained the most attributes (11) and the branch with most attributes (five), has been selected as Parsimonious level (**Step 2**). For these elements, the direct evaluations, the pair wise comparisons for few (three) reference elements and the interpolation technique presented in the Methodology section (see Formula (6)) have been applied in a later step. For the Parsimonious level, we have applied the PAHP approach here, in the first round of surveying. In this **third step (Step 3)**, the 11 \(c_{kj}\) criteria have been directly evaluated (level wisely \"level 2\") by passenger evaluators (500) based on (0-10) scale. The characteristics of the respondent pattern for this first survey round is presented by Table 3.  
During **Step 4**, we normalized the gained scores to 1 for all 11 attributes of this level. Table 5 shows the gained normalized increasing order:  
Still in this step, we had to select some reference criteria to be compared in the later stage of multi-level Parsimonious AHP methodology. As selection criteria, the PAHP  
Figure 2: The Parsimonious AHP decision structure. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c} \hline \hline
**Criteria** & **The Normalized Direct Evaluation** \\ \hline _Mental comfort_ & _0.052_ \\ Approachability & 0.058 \\ Information during travel & 0.057 \\ Time availability & 0.078 \\ Speed & 0.056 \\ _Directness_ & _0.149_ \\ Safety of Travel & 0.111 \\ Perspicuity & 0.103 \\ Physical comfort & 0.116 \\ Reliability & 0.124 \\ _Information before travel_ & _0.096_ \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 5: The gained normalized direct evaluation by passenger raters (\(\gamma(c_{kj})\)). literature [39; 44] recommends keeping the \(s\) number of selected attributes low enough for easier pair wise comparisons and, simultaneously, high enough to represent the set of the elements of the Parsimonious level. In this case study, three reference attributes (the most and the least important and an intermediate based on the first direct evaluations) seemed sufficient to select. The attributes: \"Information before travel\" (\(\gamma_{1}=0.096\)), \"Directness\" (\(\gamma_{2}=0.149\)) and \"Mental comfort\" (\(\gamma_{3}=0.052\)) have been chosen. In **Step 5**, the selected reference criteria have been compared pair wisely during the second-round survey (see its characteristics in Table 4), following the original AHP approach; the scores are presented in Table 6.  
The consistency ratio has been calculated and monotonicity has been checked. Based on the results another round for improving consistency has not been necessary since the CR got a value smaller than 0.1 (CR = 0.00258), which is considered consistent enough in AHP literature, and the monotonicity condition has also been completed. (Note that the rank of the three criteria remained the same after the pairwise comparisons). Still in this step, within the frames of the second-round survey, the evaluators have been asked to compare pair wisely the three attributes of the first and the third level. Based on the conventional AHP approach, in the first level, three questions have been asked: please compare the relative importance of Transport Quality to Service Quality in terms of their need for improvement, and do the same for Service Quality and Tractability and for Transport Quality and Tractability. Obviously, due to reciprocity, it has been unnecessary to ask in the other direction.