Spatial variability of urban public transportation fare and the trigger factors in the Benin Metropolis, Nigeria

This study examined the spatial variability of urban public transportation fare and the trigger factors in the Benin Metropolis. The study made use of mainly primary data collected through questionnaire survey, field observation and coordinates of location of household respondents. The multi-stage sampling was used in arriving at the study data from 1,202 respondents comprising 427 public transportation operators and 775 households. In the household survey, five communities were randomly selected from each of the five constituting Local Governments of the study area. Thereafter, 31 streets were systematically selected from each community where a household head was interviewed. For the public transportation operators, 15 terminal locations were selected from both the mini-buses and taxi cabs, where at least 17 copies of the operator’s questionnaire were distributed to mini-bus drivers and 11 copies to taxi cab drivers at each terminal. The data were analysed using Analysis of Variance, Inverse Distance Weighted Interpolation and Cluster Analysis. The result showed that there was a significant difference in public transportation fare between the major arterials, despite the fact that the selected respondents travelled along the same distance, thus indicating that distance was not the major factor of fare variability along the arterial corridors. However, the result of the spatial analyses revealed that fare estimation was in accordance with the interpolation assumption, although with clear cases of many deviations caused by other extraneous conditions like road quality, number of transportation inter-change and public transportation supply–demand relationship.