University Bus Services: Responding to Students’ Travel Demands?
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper deals with University bus services: Responding to students’ travel de-mands? The following comments should be addressed to improve the technical quality of the manuscript.
1. How frequently do the buses run from the city center to Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman?
2. What are some of the differences between the older UBS buses and the newer ones in terms of amenities and features?
3. What criteria are used to determine the acceptability of path coefficients in the proposed SEM model?
4. What are the criteria for considering a Cronbach Alpha, CRC, AVE, and composite reliability (CR) as satisfactory or acceptable?
5. What is the purpose of the Fornell-Larcker criterion and how does it assess discriminant validity?
Author Response
Reply to the Comments of Reviewer 1
Comment 1.1: How frequently do the buses run from the city center to Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman?
Reply: Thanks for the helpful comment. UBS at Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman works from the city center to the university and vice versa. During the workday, they are available from 6:30 until 21:00. Buses arrive every 30 minutes at the station.
The authors added more explanation in lines 80-86.
Comment 2.1: What are some of the differences between the older UBS buses and the newer ones in terms of amenities and features?
Reply: Thanks for this comment. The authors added more explanations in lines 86 to 91.
Comment 3.1: What criteria are used to determine the acceptability of path coefficients in the proposed SEM model?
Reply: Thanks for this comment. Path coefficients explain how strong the effect of one variable is on another variable. The weight of different path coefficients enables us to rank their relative statistical importance (Wong, 2019). Standardized path coefficients are between -1 and +1 and whatever the value is close to zero it means that the effect is lower. T-values must be greater than 1.64 and 1.96 to be considered the path coefficients significant at 0.1 and 0.05 level.
No specific value is determined as the threshold of path coefficients to be acceptable. The values must be compared with each other. In some research papers, values greater than 0.2 are considered high enough.
Comment 4.1: What are the criteria for considering a Cronbach Alpha, CRC, AVE, AS satisfactory or acceptable?
Reply: Thanks for the helpful comment. A Cronbach Alpha and CRC close to 1 indicate high reliability; a value greater than 0.7 is considered satisfactory (Peterson and Kim, 2013). An AVE value greater than 0.5 is considered acceptable (Chin, 1998). A composite reliability (CR) above 0.60 can make AVE scores below the thresholds valid, according to Fornell and Larcker (1981). Acceptable values for AVE are above 0.5 (Chin, 1998; Esposito Vinzi, V., Chin, W.W., Henseler, J., Wang, 2010; Henseler and Sarstedt, 2013). However, (Lam, 2012) stated that whenever the internal reliability of the model is satisfactory, then AVE values below 0.5 can be neglected, and model outputs are acceptable.
Lines 270-273.
Comment 5.1: What is the purpose of the Fornell-Larcker criterion and how does it assess discriminant validity?
Reply: The classical approach to check the discriminant validity is proposed by Fornell and Larcker (1981) who suggest that the square root of AVE in each latent variable can be used to establish discriminant validity, if this value is larger than other correlation values among the latent variables. To do this, a table is created in which the square root of AVE is manually calculated and written in bold on the diagonal of the table (Wong, 2019).
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This paper examines how UBS's can help achieve social equity and sustainability goals. However, some descriptions are not clear. Some revisions are necessary in the manuscript.
1. Please describe the academic work of this article further.
2. Please further give a mathematical model of the problem discussed in the article.
3. Please explain whether the work done in the article is of general significance.
4. The article presents a large amount of data, please analyze these data and conclusions further.
5. In the paper, authors have focused on safety and security concern. The importance of security for system needs to be analyzed to indicate advantages of your work, which can refer to：
[a] Journal of Modern Power Systems and Clean Energy, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 686-692, 2023
[b] IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 5870-5881, 2023
[c] IEEE Trans. Power Systems, vol. 37, no. 5, pp. 4067-4077, 2022
Author Response
Reply to the Comments of Reviewer 2
Comment 1.2: Please describe the academic work of this article further.
Reply: Thanks for the helpful suggestion. In lines 16-22, 108-114, 119-128 more explanations were added.
Comment 2.2: Please further give a mathematical model of the problem discussed in the article.
Reply: The proposed steps as the methodology, did not have any mathematical modeling. However, for the SEM in Figure 1 a theoretical model is presented (lines 166-182).
Comment 3.2: Please explain whether the work done in the article is of general significance.
Reply: Thanks for the helpful comment. The authors added more explanations in lines 339-341.
Comment 4.2: The article presents a large amount of data; please analyze these data and conclusions further.
Reply: Thanks for the helpful comment. The data was analyzed and presented in Figures 4 to 6 and Tables 2 to 10.
Comment 5.2: In the paper, authors have focused on safety and security concern. The importance of security for system needs to be analyzed to indicate advantages of your work, which can refer to:
[a] Journal of Modern Power Systems and Clean Energy, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 686-692, 2023
[b] IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 5870-5881, 2023
[c] IEEE Trans. Power Systems, vol. 37, no. 5, pp. 4067-4077, 2022
Reply: Thanks for the helpful comment. To explain the importance of security for transportation systems, we have reviewed new papers and cited in lines 92-94.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
1. The paper did not technically properly process the proposed solution:
- The abstract has abbrevations which is not recommended. Also abstract should be an objective representation of the article with obligatory notated it's contribution to scince.
-Figures and especially figure 1 and figure 5 are not transparent and therefore not well understood.
-The references are not properly cited in the paper
2. The organization of the work by chapters is not adequate to the instructions for the authors of the journal, and therefore the presented content is quite incomprehensible.
3. The subject matter is not presented in a comprehensive manner:
- The paper lacks with limitations of the proposed framework
- The paper lacks comparation proposed framework with already existing.
Author Response
Reply to the Comments of Reviewer 3
Comment 1.3: The abstract has abbreviations which is not recommended. Also abstract should be an objective representation of the article with obligatory notated it's contribution to science.
Reply: Thanks for the helpful comment. The authors removed the abbreviations in the abstract. In addition we have highlighted the contribution in line 16-22.
Comment 2.3: Figures and especially figure 1 and figure 5 are not transparent and therefore not well understood.
Reply: Thanks for the careful consideration. We have tried to improve the quality of Figures.
Comment 3.3: The references are not properly cited in the paper.
Reply: Thanks for the helpful comment. The authors tried to revise them by Mendely.
Comment 4.3: The organization of the work by chapters is not adequate to the instructions for the authors of the journal, and therefore the presented content is quite incomprehensible.
Reply: Thanks for the careful consideration. The authors tried to add more explanations in lines 35-39, 42-43, 47-50, 57-71, 291-293, Table 1.
Comment 5.3: Please further give a mathematical model of the problem discussed in the article.
Reply: Thanks for the helpful comment. The authors added more explanations about the model in lines 166-182. The proposed steps as the methodology did not have any mathematical modeling that can be presented.
Comment 6.3: The paper lacks with limitations of the proposed framework.
Reply: Thanks for the helpful comment. The authors added limitations of the proposed model in lines 342-344.
Comment 7.3: The paper lacks comparison of the proposed framework with already existing.
Reply: Thanks for the helpful comment. The authors tried to compare the results with previous papers, lines 316-319, 322-324, and 327-332.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
This paper considers bus services provided by universities to and from their campuses. Needless to say, these University Bus Services (UBS) can help achieve social equity and sustainability goals. This paper investigates this idea by conducting and surveying students’ views. The paper reports the results of a survey of 303 students at Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman in Iran concerning their travel demands and their use and utilisation of the respective UBS.
The whole study is based on interviews. The author collected data from interviewing students, conducting a standard interview protocol.
The current work uses a questionnaire which is fairly obvious and intuitive. It also provides a useful list of previous such case studies; it would have been better to see any of their questionnaires as well and compare with the list used in this work.
The authors have used a structural equation modelling (SEM) to analyse commuters' daily commute preferences influenced by several factors. The results are very nicely presented in this paper using graphs and tables.
My main concern is that there is no theory discussed here that could have been at least theoretically tested. The results are just statistically proven observations which are fine however more discussion is called for and needed for each result – however straightforward it may seem.
Also, the authors should compare their findings with the previous results found in the existing literature as mentioned in Section 3 of this paper.
The authors also must do an overall good editorial check. There are plenty of “mistakes” both in presentation, usage of grammar and in formatting.
To sum up, I do think this paper has discussed and presented a very nice study and I am thus happy to recommend a suitably revised version be accepted for publication, however, the revision should be done with good care.
The authors also must do an overall good editorial check. There are plenty of “mistakes” both in presentation, usage of grammar and in formatting.
Author Response
Reply to the Comments of Reviewer 4
Comment 1.4: My main concern is that there is no theory discussed here that could have been at least theoretically tested. The results are just statistically proven observations, which are fine however more discussion is called for and needed for each result – however straightforward it may seem.
Reply: Thanks for your kind attention. The authors tried more explanations in lines 166-182.
Comment 2.4: Also, the authors should compare their findings with the previous results found in the existing literature as mentioned in Section 3 of this paper.
Reply: Thanks for the helpful comment. The authors tried to compare the results with previous papers in lines 316-332.
Comment 3.4: The authors also must do an overall good editorial check. There are plenty of “mistakes” both in presentation, usage of grammar and in formatting.
Reply: The authors tried to revise the paper completely.
Comment 4.4: To sum up, I do think this paper has discussed and presented a very nice study and I am thus happy to recommend a suitably revised version be accepted for publication, however, the revision should be done with good care.
Reply: Thanks for your kind attention.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The author has made a good revision of the review comments and it can be accepted.
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors accepted all my suggestions and in an acceptable way implemented corrections in the paper based on them.
