Abstract:

Wrocław is among the most congested cities in Poland [1]. One approach to alleviating this issue is to promote greater use of public transport. A key factor influencing residents’ decisions to use public transport is service quality—a concept that is inherently multidimensional. To capture this complexity, the quality of public transport in Wrocław was measured as a latent construct, represented by 14 observable quality attributes. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was conducted to assess the structure of these attributes, and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was employed to determine the number of underlying factors. Based on Kaiser’s criterion—which retains components with eigenvalues greater than 1—two factors were extracted. Collectively, these factors account for 51.23% of the variance in the original variables. To align the factor structure with the observed variables, a Varimax normalised orthogonal rotation was applied. Each quality attribute was assigned to a factor based on its factor loading, with a threshold of 0.6 as the minimum value for inclusion. As a result, all 14 quality attributes were grouped under one of the two extracted factors. The model was developed using data collected from a sample of 500 Wrocław residents who use the city’s tram or bus services and completed the survey using a five-point Likert scale. All data collected during the study were processed and analysed using Statistica 13.3 software.