Investigating public perceptions and its implication toward Trans Koetaradja policy considering latent motivation

Abstract

Urban bus system so-called Trans Koetaradja (TK) has been considered and piloted as a way to mitigate motorcycles and cars dependency in Banda Aceh, capital of Aceh Province. It is assumed that the effectiveness of the such proposed policy would be useful if the public acceptance of this policy has a positive response. Therefore, this study intends to investigate the attitudes of the public in responding to such proposed policy. The data were collected within line 3 and line 4 of TK that is City Center - Mata Ie and City Center - Ajun - Lhoknga. The data collection method used was Stated Preference (SP) with a total of 220 samples collected using a stratified random sampling method. The SP questionnaire contains information about socio-economic, travel behavior, and respondents' perceptions representing their attitudes towards TK policy. People are dependent on their vehicles due to public transport challenging to use. The psychological indicators such as like driving a car & motorcycle and TK has limited accessibility have significant manifested to the latent variable of Inhibition of freedom of movement/activity. These sign representing the attitudes of the people in Banda Aceh would be dependence to their own vehicles and directly affected to the rejection to use proposed bus system of the proposed policy. Furthermore, male commuters who have low education level and income households more likely to autos dependent and more feeling inhibition of freedom of movement/activity if they use public transport.