Efficient public transportation provides economic and social opportunities that increase accessibility to markets and employment as well as providing investment benefits. Key challenges to the U.S. public transportation industry include developing modes and increasing the availability of public transportation in a manner that meets the needs of individual users in a cost effective manner. A problem facing public transportation officials is the need to understand the factors that influence consumer decision-making and consumer attitudes toward public transportation. Feedback regarding experiences as well as expectations from commuters provides information for developing and improving public transportation. Thus, decision-making factors of end-users are keys to improving supply, growth, and understanding utilization of public transportation. Public transportation officials seek to improve the public transportation experience for commuters by increasing modes and benefits of the systems. The decision-making factors of the end-users require identification and examination in order to provide a high quality and efficient experience for commuters. The research questions of interest in the current dissertation are: (1) What are the decision-making factors affecting commuters’ attitudes toward public transportation? and (2) How do the end-user decision-making factors affect the supply of public transportation? The purpose of this research is to extend the current body of knowledge about decision-making factors by developing and testing a new theoretical model to measure the attitudes of public transportation end-users. This study has its theoretical foundation in the theory of planned behavior, theory of reasoned action, and rational choice theory. To understand how public transportation is affected by decision-making factors, it is necessary to analyze the relationships among the decision factors and attitudes. The findings of this study contribute by building theory and having implications for practice. This study employs a mixed methodology of qualitative and quantitative research. More specifically, the development of a framework and testing of that framework via collection of data using a survey instrument, semi-structured interviews, and data scraping of customer comments underpin the methodology employed in this study. To this end, Essay 1 develops a conceptual framework of decision-making factors that affect the supply of public transportation based on the extant literature. The integrated framework developed is operationalized using a survey to test a model that depicts the framework within the context to which the study was situated. The results of the structural model using PLS provide insights for the development of public transportation. Essay 2 involves two phases in the methodology. First, the study develops a causal loop that depicts the operationalized conceptual framework from Essay 1. Second, discussion panels were conducted to confirm the system dynamic causal loop visualization that was developed to fit the model. Finally, Essay 3 examines the conceptual framework developed and tested in the prior essays by analyzing electronic word of mouth (eWOM) of online comments. The third essay examines eWOM of current public transportation users that is available online. This eWOM data was examined using text mining and the resulting quantitative output was compared to the operationalized theoretical framework from the prior works. The results also illustrate the functionality of text analytics for confirmatory model assessment.

Thesis (MTech (Information Technology))--Cape Peninsula University, 2016. / Climate change imposes indisputable burdens on economic development by significantly causing damage to the environment. In the transportation sector, carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles are seen as top environmental pollutants around the world and in South Africa. Despite increasing environmental issues, many people, including business leaders, generally think of environmental issues as disconnected from their everyday business lives and behavioural patterns. The Republic of South Africa as a member of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) encourages any practices and processes that will control, reduce or prevent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. The adoption of telecommuting for travel reduction can impact positively on environmental sustainability by reducing the amount of commuter driving and thus reducing carbon emissions. Telecommuting is an arrangement where an employee works from home or out of office using telecommunication links (internet, email and/or telephone) to reduce commuting to and from the office, enhance productivity in the organisation, and reduce office space requirements. However, despite the well documented benefits of telecommuting, the uptake of telecommuting in South Africa is slow. This study falls under the Green Information Technology research field. The aim of the study is to identify the reasons behind the slow adoption of telecommuting in South African organisations. The study followed embedded multiple-case studies. Qualitative data were collected from nine companies using semi-structured interviews with 19 participants comprising of Information Technology (IT) and Human Resource (HR) managers, telecommuters and non-telecommuters. The companies were selected to be as diverse as possible in the operating sector and both purposive and snowball strategies were used.