Recommending transit: Disentangling users' willingness to recommend transit and their intended continued use

During the past decade, transit agencies have been trying to increase ridership by attracting new passengers and retaining existing ones. One key strategy to attract new passengers is to encourage current transit users to promote the service to others. However, little is known about the factors that influence riders to become transit promoters. Therefore, this paper attempts to determine the factors that affect passengers' willingness to recommend public transit to a co-worker, friend, or family member. In addition, we aim to better understand transit promoters and non-promoters intentions to continue using the service in the future. The study uses a 2014 transit satisfaction survey of users of several bus routes in Montreal, Canada. Descriptive statistics and a logit model are used to understand the factors affecting passengers' willingness to recommend the transit service and their intentions for continued future use. Users' satisfaction with service attributes increase the odds of promoting the service, including satisfaction with their waiting time (3.32 times more), travel time (2.70 times more), and experience on board (1.93 times more). We also found that the intention to continue using transit in the future is not correlated with the willingness to recommend the service to others. The findings of this study can be of interest to marketing and planning departments at transit agencies as it provides new insight into transit passengers' behavior, specifically their willingness to recommend the service to others and their intentions to continue using the service in the future.