BRT in Makassar (BRT Trans Mamminasata), Indonesia

BRT is one of the best alternative systems to address transportation issues in big cities. A lot of cities have been implementing the system and some of those cities are notable as successful BRT systems. As one of the biggest cities in Indonesia, and with >1.7 million of inhabitants, Makassar and the adjacent cities (Mamminasata) have been suffering from transportation issues, including traffic jam. The central government has issuing a policy to urge every capital city in Indonesia to implement BRT in order to address transportation issues along with other issues attached to it. Thus, BRT Trans Mamminasata was launched several years ago by the Indonesian Ministry of Transportation, and it is operated by Perum Damri. Despite all the efforts done by the government and other parties, the BRT is still lacking of passengers. That is the main problem which indicates that it is likely that the performance of the BRT has not satisfying its users yet. This research aims to explain the effect of current BRT Trans Mamminasata performance to user’s satisfaction, thus the research questions are figuring out to what extent the current BRT Trans Mamminasata performance (service, accessibility, availability, and time) affect the user’s satisfaction, and the sub questions are trying to figure out: first, the current performance of the BRT, second is figuring out how different SES perceive the current performance of the BRT, and lastly is figuring out which dependent variable is more significant compared to the others in term of satisfying the BRT users. Methodology used in this research is relying on qualitative method, in which it is related to the fact that it has only a small unit of research, and that outcomes are not obviously measurable and quantifiable. Instruments used in this research are interview and online questionnaire, where the interview is conducted with 10 key informants, and the online questionnaire is using random sampling. Moreover, single case study is used as research strategy in this research. The analysis are conducted using Atlas ti to analyse the interview transcripts, while SPSS is used to analyse the online questionnaire output. Factor analysis, reliability test, and multi regression analysis conducted on the SPSS. The main findings of this research is that the current performance of BRT Trans Mamminasata does affect its user’s satisfaction, and generally users are satisfied enough with the current performance, although there are a few aspects need to improve. The result regarding to correlation between SES with the satisfaction variable shows a positive relation.