Highlights • The study investigates the role of psychological factors on transit service quality. • The study adopted an Error Components logit model with systematic taste variations. • Confirmatory factor analysis and multivariate analysis of variance is utilized. • Psychological factors play a vital role in shaping preferences towards transit. • Psychological factors vary significantly across socioeconomic characteristics.

Abstract The study aims at quantifying the influence of subjective psychological factors on shaping customers’ preferences towards transit service attributes. In addition, the study examines the association between customers’ subjective psychological tendencies and socioeconomic characteristics. A dataset of 1,241 potential transit users is explored through an Error Components (EC) logit model with systematic taste variations and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). The results quantified the influence of subjective psychological aspects on customers’ preferences towards various transit service attributes and concluded the power of psychological aspects in explaining preference heterogeneity. For instance, environmentally conscious customers are more tolerant towards walking time to/from bus stops and have a higher appreciation of at-stop real-time information provision than others. Further, the multivariate analysis of variance highlighted that customers’ psychological factors vary significantly across their socioeconomic characteristics. For example, young customers are more environmentally conscious and have higher perceived behaviour control and social norms towards transit than old and middle-aged customers. Overall, the findings provide research-based evidence to practitioners and policymakers on the dire need to jointly considering both psychological and utilitarian aspects in evaluating the desired quality from public transit.