The question stems from socio-cultural perceptions on the usage of bus, for instance. In many societies, using bus for daily transportation is perceived to be humiliated, and the bus users are seen as low-skilled poor people, who cannot afford to buy cars.
This is a question of perception. In Most western societies, bus travel is not stigmatised as it is viewed as a public good and place restrictions on the use of vehicles on accessing major centres through charging for parking, and as the area increases in parking demand there are higher charges to discourage car use.
I think that social perception can certainly influence bus use, and in a number of ways.
Most obviously, is the stigma issue that you refer to, and there are quite a few articles that explore this - e.g. Daniel Bromley's 2010 article in the journal Natural Resources Forum.
A less direct mechanism for this meanwhile is that in many (perhaps most) societies buying a car provides a major badge of status, and of course when one owns a car, then one uses the bus much less often - see Balcombe et al (2004) The Demand for Public Transport (TRL Report 593) for values on the strength of this relationship.
And another indirect mechanism is that many of the better UK bus operators (e.g. Brighton and Hove, Nottingham City Transport, Trent and Barton, Oxford Bus Company, Travel West Midlands) have spent a lot of money in recent years on marketing their services to make them more attractive to middle class users in a bid to remove the stigma associated with bus use. Paul Kevill has done some good work on this (his PhD was Marketing of Public Transport at University of Central England in around 2002), and I have written one or two papers on marketing in the bus industry that go into more detail on these issues at - https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/handle/2134/3344, and https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/handle/2134/3597.
Deer Marcus and Brian, Thank you so much for the clever response and references. Currently, I am working on a paper where I aim to see the effects/influence of social stigma on the use of public transport with reference to Saudi context.
It may be useful to map the bus routes and compare the routes to the social status of an area. This should also explain how access has been viewed by the public servants who have designed the network.
In Ghana where the bus system is not that common as compare to that of the mini bus, the perception is that the rich have their mean of transport thus their own car whiles the poor will have to make do with the public transport. so in a greater sens yes
u can look at this thesis
TRAFFIC CONGESTION:
THE BANE OF A BUS RAPID TRANSIT SYSTEM IN ACCRA, GHANA?
Agyemang, Ernest
Master of Philosophy Thesis in Development Studies (specializing in Geography) Department of Geography Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.
I think that privacy should also be considered in explaining the reasons for low patronage of public transport in Saudi Arabian context. Privacy might have more weight than social status. Actually, Choguill in his 2008 article (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197397507000379) on sustainable neighbourhood opined that there must be a change in lifestyle in Saudi Arabia before sustainability can be achieved. This view is also stated by Aina et al. (http://www.intechopen.com/books/advances-in-landscape-architecture/towards-an-integrative-theory-approach-to-sustainable-urban-design-in-saudi-arabia-the-value-of-geod).
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