Abstract Urban public transport is a key component of sustainable mobility in developing cities, where ownership and use of individual motorized vehicles continues to increase, while congestion raises concerns about accessibility and environmental impacts. A key challenge in delivering better services is understanding the nature of service prformance characteristics and their roles in influencing user satisfaction, thereby improving operational efficiency and system effectiveness. However, there is a shortage of empirical research integrating performance-based SERVPERF with Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to understand service performance influences passenger satisfaction and future usage intention in irregular, resource constrained bus and minibus service systems, especially in Middle Eastern cities. This study uses a performance-only SERVPERF framework integrated with Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to test the relationships between perceived service quality, user satisfaction, and future use intention for the bus and minibus systems of Baghdad City. Six underlying service dimensions were conceptualized: comfort, perceived time adherence, safety & security, operations & availability, accessibility, and fare and affordability. Due to limited discriminative power of fare affordability, a conclusion based on 550 valid survey responses, it was excluded from the final model. The structural model demonstrated good fit (CFI = 0.961, RMSEA = 0.039) and exhibited moderate-to-substantial explanatory power, accounting for 58.9% of the variance in satisfaction (R² = 0.589) and 36.6% of the variance in behavioral intention (R² = 0.366). Perceived time adherence (β = 0.589, p < 0.001) and operations & availability (β = 0.487, p < 0.001) are the most predictive of passenger satisfaction, compared to other factors. Satisfaction acts as the central mechanism linking service performance to behavioral intention. Model comparison supported retaining a full mediation structure at the global level, while path-level results revealed a mixed mediation pattern, with partial mediation for Time Adherence, full mediation for Operations & Availability, and no mediation effects for Comfort, Safety, and Accessibility. The findings imply that, in informal and resource-constrained transit systems such as Baghdad City operational reliability and service availability should be prioritized through basic operational standards and performance monitoring such as headway stability, vehicle availability, and actual waiting time to achieve the largest gains in satisfaction and sustained public transport use. Conclusively, the validated SERVPERF–SEM framework provides a robust and transferable tool for engineering-oriented performance assessment and operational improvement of public transport systems in resource-scarce developing cities.
Abbas et al. (Mon,) studied this question.