ASSESSMENT OF MINIBUS TAXI TRANSPORT SERVICE CHALLENGES AND PASSENGER FARE ESTABLISHEMENT A CASE STUDY ON FOUR SELECTED ROUTES OF HAWASSA CITY, ETHIOPIA

Abstract

In the developing cities like Hawassa an increase in size and number of population generate increased travel demand and triggered improved transport service. Among the public transport modes, the service provided by minibus taxi are unattractive due to the presence of a factors like providing service quality problem, mismatching of demand and supply of mini bus taxi and the transport fare system problem. This study aimed to evaluate the existing service quality, the distribution pattern and passenger fare establishment methods of mini bus taxis in the city and compared the current using taxi distribution and passenger fare with four stage demand modeling results and HDM-4 software based results respectively. Regarding with this, the data’s like characteristics of vehicle, geometric characteristics of road, price of vehicle component, and various traffic data were collected through field survey, interview and questioner survey methods. The qualitative analysis which is subjective measures were used. For analysis of taxi distribution four stage demand modeling and other statistical analysis model which were fit to our data such as category analysis, gravity model and logit model were used and to establish the passenger fare HDM-4 multipurpose software were utilized. The finding of this study result revealed that more than half of transport users are dissatisfied on over all service provision of minibus taxi. Related to the result of taxi distribution The number of trip attraction and production for route of old bus station to mobil station of each purpose of trip home to work, home to school, home to shop and home to other purpose found to be 2657,3024,1602and1947respectively and for production trip purposes the number of trips were found to be 2018,1982,1919 and1784 respectively.. Concerning with result of passenger fare produced by HDM-4 software, the fare produced for one km road segment was about 1.35 Birr person; however the fare established by Hawassa city transport office was 0.75 cents per person. Finally, proper consideration of input parameters is required when setting passenger fare for each mode of transport and the transport bureau should studied further on demand and supply of mini bus taxi and service delivery in order to improve the operational system of minibus taxi in the city