In a Wuxi transit pilot, trust—not convenience—shaped plans to use it

How trust formed

The researchers found a stepwise pattern in which personalization significantly enhanced convenience, and convenience predicted overall service quality. Service quality and perceived privacy protection each significantly predicted trust in the platform. Trust was the only statistically significant proximal predictor of behavioral intention in the full model.

Further analysis found a significant indirect link from personalization to service quality through convenience, and from perceived privacy protection to behavioral intention through trust. Longer chains linking upstream service features to behavioral intention were positive but did not meet the study’s conservative dual criterion for statistical significance. Price fairness was included in the framework, but the abstract does not report a significant relationship for it.

Why trust matters

Demand-responsive transit depends on both digital coordination and a physical ride, so users must judge a service they may not yet fully understand or know how reliably it will work. In this early-stage pilot, the results suggest that improving convenient and personalized service features may not be enough on their own: users’ intention to use the service was most closely connected to whether they trusted the platform. Privacy protection and perceived service quality were associated with that trust, highlighting the role of these cues when a new mobility service operates under uncertainty.

Evidence and caveats

The study used survey data from 147 active early adopters in a human-driven demand-responsive transit pilot in Wuxi, China. Researchers tested relationships among service evaluations, trust and behavioral intention with partial least-squares structural equation modeling. Because the data came from one pilot and measured reported perceptions and intentions at an early stage, the results do not show whether the same pattern applies to other transit services or predicts actual long-term use. The survey design also cannot by itself establish cause and effect.