Satisfaction with Public Transport Trips

5.3. Paper III - How does travel satisfaction sum up? Decomposing the door-to-door experience for 
multimodal trips.
Paper III aims to answer the question “how do travelers combine memories of a series of pleasant and 
unpleasant episodes of their multi-leg trips to construct an evaluation of their overall travel experience”. 
Therefore the objective is to investigate the relative importance of satisfaction with access, main and 
egress legs for the whole travel experience. Normative and heuristic rules are tested to define how door-
to-door trips’ satisfaction is aggregated in relation to each trip leg satisfaction. 
In general, normative rules (e.g. simple average or average weighted by waiting/transfer times) are found 
to be better predictors of retrospectively aggregated experiences than heuristic rules. These findings 
resonate with previous research (e.g. Suzuki et al., 2014; Miron-Shatz, 2009) and indicate that no trip leg 
can be neglected since all of them have an impact on overall travel satisfaction. The average weighted 
rule that considers both moving (in- vehicle/walking) and waiting times (Duration weighted complex -
DWC) performs particularly well, especially when applying a waiting time weight of 3 or 4 times in-

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vehicle or walking time (DWC3 and DWC4). Nonetheless, the way travelers aggregate their door-to-door 
trips varies in regard of the type of trip (trip configurations). Hence, trip characteristics should be 
considered when multi-modal trips are investigated. 
As mentioned above, all trip legs are shown to be relevant in constructing an overall evaluation of door-
to-door trips. However, the main trip leg followed at a considerable distance by the access leg are 
identified to be the most relevant part of the trip, regardless of the trip configuration. 
5.5. Paper IV - What is the role of weather, built-environment and accessibility geographical