Design a Semantic Scale for Passenger Perceived Quality Surveys of Urban Rail Transit: Within Attribute’s Service Condition and Rider’s Experience

A better understanding of passenger perceived quality helps urban rail transit managers adopt better strategies to improve the service quality of urban rail transit, which is beneficial to the sustainable development of an urban rail transit system itself and cities. This paper designs a semantic scale to survey passenger perceived quality of urban rail transit. The methodology is selecting specific features of an attribute and then describing the features to present the attribute’s service condition and the rider’s experience. The scale’s options can reduce cognitive steps and hesitation for riders to answer the survey questionnaire. Furthermore, it enables urban rail transit managers to understand passenger perceived quality more visually. After verifying the reliability and validity of the semantic scale, an empirical study was conducted to compare the evaluation results of the proposed semantic scale, Likert, and numeric scales. Compared to the Likert and numeric scales, the evaluation result of the semantic scale is fairer for attributes with homogeneous service conditions over operation periods from the transit agency perspective. Meanwhile, it is more homogeneous for attributes with homogeneous service conditions and is more heterogeneous for attributes with heterogeneous service conditions.