Abstarct: In recent decades, improving the quality of urban services, particularly in the field of public transportation, has become one of the most important concerns of urban management and a key indicator of citizen satisfaction. Public transportation, as one of the core services provided by municipalities, plays a decisive role in enhancing urban quality of life, promoting social equity, and reducing traffic congestion and air pollution. Nevertheless, citizens’ perceptions of the quality of these services often differ from their expectations, and accurately identifying these gaps and prioritizing improvement actions requires the use of precise, decision-support analytical approaches. Accordingly, the present study aims to evaluate the quality of public transportation services provided by the Municipality of Gorgan and to determine improvement priorities using a hybrid approach.This research is applied in terms of purpose and descxriptive–survey in terms of methodology. The statistical population consists of citizens who use the public transportation services of Gorgan Municipality. Data were collected through a modified SERVQUAL questionnaire using convenience sampling from 400 citizens of Gorgan. In the data analysis process, the gap between citizens’ expectations and perceptions was first calculated baxsed on weighted scores. Then, by considering the relative importance of the items, the adjusted service quality gap was derived. Subsequently, in order to weight the criteria and sub-criteria baxsed on ease of improvement, the multi-criteria decision-making technique SWARA was employed. By combining the adjusted gap with the weights obtained from SWARA, a composite improvement priority index was calculated and the items were ranked accordingly. In addition, to simultaneously analyze importance and performance, a weighted Importance–Performance Analysis (IPA) matrix was constructed.The results indicate that across all five dimensions of the SERVQUAL model and all items, there is a significant negative gap between citizens’ expectations and perceptions, reflecting a relative dissatisfaction with the current state of public transportation services. The largest gaps were observed in the dimensions of empathy and assurance, followed by responsiveness, reliability, and finally tangibles. The findings of the composite improvement priority index and the IPA matrix analysis further revealed that only a subset of items falls within the critical “Concentrate Here” quadrant; these items were identified, baxsed on the composite index, as the main and most urgent priorities for improvement. Finally, baxsed on the obtained results, managerial recommendations were proposed using a realistic and data-driven approach in order to enable optimal allocation of resources and effective improvement of public transportation service quality in Gorgan Municipality. The hybrid approach employed in this study can also serve as a suitable basis for assessing service quality in other organizations.