Uma análise sistêmica do serviço de transporte intermunicipal de passageiros.

Abstract

Buses have been used by most people in Brazil and have become one of the main means of transportation throughout the country to commute in urban, interurban and interstate areas lately. However, there have been some failures in this public transport system such as insufficient number of vehicles, crowded buses and lack of safety which have disappointed its users, according to recent polls and surveys about transportation in Brazilian cities. Nowadays, the users' dissatisfaction along with the unemployment have given birth to the alternative system of transport. This new trend has become popular all over the country, particularly in Northeast of Brazil in the principal cities as Recife - PE, Natal -RN, Fortaleza - CE, Joao Pessoa and Campina Grande - PB. In Paraiba, for example, this alternative transport system has reached a far high rate although there are a lot of divergences about it and its conditions. In fact, something should be done to evaluate the performance of the public transport system in these areas so that it enables the implementation of policies which answer the needs of those involved or affected by this new trend. Tliis work aims to make a multicriterial estimation of the interurban transport system in Campina Grande which is thought to be an important center in the economy of the state and have the second largest transport system in Paraiba. The conventional approaches of evaluation used by most decision-makers are fundamentally based upon the economic analysis. However, such monocnterial approaches just consider economic criteria instead of estimating the relation among the other elements existing in complex systems. The application of multicriterial approaches in their evaluations have fulfilled the deficiencies in complex systems, such as the transportation ones. The methodology indicated to evaluate the performance of the transport system is based on the Analytic Network Process (ANP), developed by Thomas L. Saaty, which has a structure formed with its main members and clusters who are free to take their own decisions. Based on this process, comparisons in parity are made to establish priorities that represent the influence existing among groups of factors in the decision-making. The systematic nature of this methodology enables a wide view of all the relevant aspects of the problems like the groups engaged in the process and their criteria when analyzed under several points of view to priorize alternative courses of action. The main purpose of the structured pattern is to improve the interurban transport service involving all the groups engaged in the process such as alternative operators, users, the government and bus companies. It also aims to consider the groups' criteria, vehicles availability and safety for the users, and new alternatives and the connections among the elements of the system. The data will be analyzed through different factors including social, political, environmental and economic aspects in its structure. This work suggests some effective alternatives to improve the interurban transport service and indicates the implementation quality controls systems as the one of the higher priority (0,3565), followed by the implementation of mixed fleets (0,2378), ruling of the alternative transport system (0,1670), preservation of the existing system (0,1350), and the prohibition of the alternative transport system (0,1037). Choosing the implementation of quality control systems and marketing strategies in bus companies as priorities reveals that it is important the concern of improving die current interurban transport system offering a service of good quality which attracts the bus users again as soon as possible.