Scheduled highway bus service to cope with the operation of Taiwan high speed railway

As the Taiwan High Speed Railway (THSR) starts its formal operation in 2007, the highway bus service companies in Taiwan are expected to inevitably lose their market shares and customers. This paper tries to investigate the strategies and related actions for highway bus operators to cope with the competition from THSR. A willingness model of passengers is constructed by the structural equation modeling approach to understand customers' demand. According the analysis results from this study, price, in-car service, quality, and general service strategies have influential impacts on passenger's preference to take highway bus service. Findings also show that the proposed actions are all practically significant to respective strategies.