Scenarios for the Development of Polish Passenger Transport Services in Pandemic Conditions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear author/s,

I appreciate your article with title Scenarios for the development of polish passenger transport services in pandemic conditions. It is very actual and suit for selected journal.

Below you can find my recommendations:

1. It is needed to improve English language (some words and prepositions  are incorrect)
2. Add description to data label (in charts)
3. It is needed to align pictures colors
4. Missing established hypothesis and clearly state them
5. Missing main aim of the article in abstract
6. It is necessary to extend conclusions

Author Response

Thank you very much for all your valuable comments and suggestions. We would like to respond to the specific comments indicated.

1. We have checked the manuscript again and made every effort to eliminate all linguistic errors in the text with special attention to the prepositions.
2. The description to data label was added where they were missing: in Figure 6, Figure 7, and Figure
3. The colors of all Figures were aligned.
4. The hypothesis was stated in section Materials and Methods (lines: 177-179).
5. The main purpose of the article was added in the Abstract section (lines:12-14).
6. We extended the Conclusions as recommended by the reviewer.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

Thank you for your work. Although the article provides interesting insights, it lacks several facts:

- Some of the authors' claims are not substantiated by citation.

- The discussion and conclusions of this paper are not sufficient, the authors must complete them.

- The authors do not have more recent data from 2021, how did the situation develop after the release of the pandemic measures?

- Should the debate also move towards persuading passengers to use public transport? Because the pandemic has fostered individual motoring and the problem of road congestion is enormous.

Even in the set scenarios, the authors do not address several factors related to the pandemic and the behaviour of society. Therefore, they should reconsider the set of criteria. Likewise, the price cannot be considered a quality criterion, therefore the conclusions regarding it must be interpreted differently.

It is necessary to supplement several findings from foreign literature and thus supplement the discussion of these findings.

Best regards,

Reviewer

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for all your valuable comments and suggestions. We would like to respond to the specific comments indicated.

• We corrected the issue of correct citation in such a way that public statements did not raise any objections, while statistical and similar data contained a verified literature source.
• The discussion and conclusions in the manuscript have been revised again and supplemented as rightly suggested by the reviewer.
• The recent data from 2021, how did the situation develop after the release of the pandemic measures is not yet officially available in the source we used for the analysis of previous years as the statistical data is published annually. However, we wrote a comment about the situation observed (lines: 287-297).
• Investigations on traveling behavior have been added to the Discussion section (lines: 412-419). We present here the results of research from the international literature on the threat resulting from the increase in individual transport causing congestion in cities. As a result of the added issues, the list of literature was supplemented.
• In the set scenarios, we only discussed those factors related to the pandemic and the behavior of society which, according to the research results were most relevant. In their case, the greatest turbulence was demonstrated in individual scenarios. That is why descriptions focused on the two following factors: the frequency of travel of the means of transport and the availability of disinfectants.
• The price cannot be considered a quality criterion, therefore the conclusions regarding it are interpreted differently in lines 469-475.

Best regards,

Authors

Reviewer 3 Report

I think the authors have presented in a good way to describe what was going on for public transportation in Poland. The only concern I have for this study is that the survey was conducted among the student of the 5th semester of transport studies and the employees at the Silesian University of Technology, thus there is a high potential bias of the selection of the sample. Will the inclusion of people from other occupations will have different opinions, resulting in dramatic differences compared to the findings in this study here? I think at least the authors should have mentioned it somewhere that the survey was limited to a certain group of people. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for all your valuable comments and suggestions. We would like to respond to the specific comments indicated. The group of people included in the survey was not large, mainly due to the extraordinary situation of the lockdown, especially since it concerned its first stage. Because of this situation, it was decided to research a small group. Indeed, extending the research to other social groups or people in other professions could change the results of the research. Suggestions for changing the results of the research, and in particular the weighting of the critical factors influencing the development of passenger transport, have been added in section 5: discussion (lines: 420-434). The fact that the survey was limited to a selected number of people was mentioned in point 4.2. (lines: 301-304).

Best regards,

Authors

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

After reading the new version of the manuscript, it can be stated that the reviewer's comments are incorporated.

Thank you