Assessing the Efficiency of Mass Transit Systems in the United States

Frustrated with increased parking problems, unstable gasoline prices, and stifling traffic congestion, a growing number of metropolitan city dwellers consider utilizing the mass transit system. Reflecting this sentiment, a ridership of the mass transit system across the United States has been on the rise for the past several years. A growing demand for the mass transit system, however, necessitates the expansion of service offerings, the improvement of basic infrastructure/routes, and the additional employment of mass transit workers, including drivers and maintenance crews. Such a need requires the optimal allocation of financial and human resources to the mass transit system in times of shrinking budgets and government downsizing. Thus, the public transit authority is faced with the dilemma of “doing more with less.” That is to say, the public transit authority needs to develop a “lean” strategy which can maximize transit services with the minimum expenses. To help the public transit authority develop such a lean strategy, this report identifies the best-in-class practices in the U.S. transit service sector and proposes transit policy guidelines that can best exploit lean principles built upon best-in-class practices

Heterogeneity in Technical Efficiency of the French Urban Transport: 1995 to 2002

In this paper, we analyze the heterogeneity in the technical efficiency of a sample of French urban transport companies with a translog production frontier model. The model generates efficiency disentangling homogenous and heterogeneous variables. Our study concluded that outputs and inputs play a major role in transport efficiency and we find that the efficiency scores vary along the sample. Policy implication is derived.Urban Transport; France, Translog random Frontier Model and Decision-Making Unit.

Performance Analysis of Urban Public Transport Service Enterprise in Addis Ababa: Data Envelopment Analysis

Measuring the public transit service enterprise's performance is a powerful tool for decision-making and managerial control to assess the utilization level of various inputs to obtain the desired outputs. Thus, this study aims to measure the performance of public bus transport enterprises of Addis Ababa using the Data Envelopment Analysis method during the year 2016/17 to 2017/18. There is an absence of studies in the country examining public transport sector efficiency using the DEA approach, which makes this research a chance. The study employed an input-oriented DEA model to measure bus transit efficiency. Thus, fleet size and a total number of employees are used as inputs, while covered vehicle km and total passengers transported per year are used as an output to measure performance. Then, the enterprises' technical efficiency and operational effectiveness are analyzed based on secondary data collected from each enterprise. The overall results show Anbessa and Sheger city buses are technically efficient and operationally effective in utilizing their inputs to deliver the desired output compared to others in the city. However, outcomes for Alliance city bus and Public Service Employees Transport Service Enterprise indicate that they utilize their inputs inefficiently and consumed their services ineffectively. Hence, these inefficient enterprises need significant improvements in using their resources to enhance their performance and deliver services incompetent with other operators in the city. Besides, the Government should encourage privately owned public transport operators in the city and provide subsidies and other incentives to all based on their existing performance. Keywords: efficiency, public transport, Data Envelopment Analysis, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia DOI: 10.7176/PPAR/11-7-05 Publication date:August 31st 202

Identification of Segments of French Urban Public Transport with a Latent Class Frontier Model

This paper analyses technical efficiency of French urban public transport from 1995 to 2002 with unbalanced panel data. The latent class frontier model is used allowing the identification of different segments in the production frontier. We find that there are three statistically significant segments in the sample. Therefore, we conclude that no common transport policy can reach all of the transportation companies analysed, thereby requiring transport policies by segments.Urban public transport, stochastic production frontier, latent class model, technical efficiency, panel data.

Transit Agencies Performance Assessment and Implications

Although most transit systems operate in small urban and rural areas in the United States, these systems have rarely received the same attention as their urban counterparts, both in terms of ensuring the efficiency and effectiveness of their operations and understanding the factors that affect their performance. This thesis\u27s main goals are to assess the performance of rural and small urban public transit agencies and help them evaluate adopting a ridehailing program, thereby improving their performance. We applied operations research and decision-making tools to two public transit projects in small urban and rural areas. The first project focuses on three models developed to evaluate the efficiency, effectiveness, and combined efficiency-effectiveness of rural transit agencies using data envelopment analysis. The models were estimated for the case study of transit systems in rural Appalachia and measured the agencies\u27 performance relative to their peers. Besides, the returns to scale were explored in the context of rural transit management. The second project focused on employing ridehailing programs in small urban and rural areas to improve agencies’ performance and reach. The most relevant criteria were identified to evaluate the performance of different ridehailing programs using multi-criteria decision analysis methodology. To perform a set of MCDA methods, we used the perceived rating of each ridehailing program according to the stakeholders\u27 opinions with respect to each criterion. The framework was estimated for the case study of Mountain Line Transit Authority in Morgantown, WV

Evaluating the Comprehensive Benefit of Public Transport Service – The Perspective of Three Stakeholders

Most studies investigate the benefit of public trans-port service from either the perspective of the operators or the public individually, failing to bind them together. Furthermore, they have not considered the significance of the government in quantifying the benefit. This pa-per explores the comprehensive benefit of public trans-port service from the perspectives of three stakeholders; namely, the operators, the public, and government. We develop a comprehensive benefit evaluation tool that is able to quantify production efficiency, service effect, and environmental effect, and test the effectiveness of the tool through a case study in 36 central cities of China. A network data envelopment analysis (NDEA) is used to evaluate the efficiency of the production and service sub-process, and comprehensive benefits. The results re-veal the following: (1) during the period 2010–2017, the production efficiency in 36 central cities showed a down-ward trend; (2) the service effectiveness did not change considerably from 2010 to 2013 but declined gradual-ly during the period 2014–2017; (3) the comprehensive benefits rarely changed during the period 2010–2013, but gradually got worse in response to reductions in the production efficiency and service effectiveness during the period 2014–2017. This study offers a robust tool to mea-sure the benefits of public transport in China for better decision-making, in terms of transit operation and man-agement

Determinants of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system revenue and effectiveness – A global benchmarking exercise

Bus rapid transit systems (BRT) have evolved in all shapes and sizes around the world in the last 30 years motivated by providing greater efficiency and value for money than potential alternatives. This paper aims to explore and compare the effectiveness (including its determinants) and revenue potential of 58 BRT systems globally. A key research question for this paper is to what extent there is a trade-off between long term capital expenditure and short term operating cost. The results suggest that BRT systems located in developing countries or countries that have high population densities are successful in generating higher revenues per passenger and unit of input than their conventional bus counterparts but are from a community perspective not more cost effective in doing so. Better BRT standards and hence higher capital expenditure, while significantly increasing patronage and input effectiveness do not have a significant impact on either yields or cost effectiveness. In contrast, public ownership and the number of stations are on average associated with higher cost effectiveness scores

Multi-Dimensional Assessment of Transit System Efficiency and Incentive-based Subsidy Allocation

Over the past several decades, contending with traffic congestion and air pollution has emerged as one of the imperative issues across the world. Development of a transit-oriented urban transport system has been realized by an increasing number of countries and administrations as one of the most effective strategies for mitigating congestion and pollution problems. Despite the rapid development of public transportation system, doubts regarding the efficiency of the system and financing sustainability have arisen. Significant amount of public resources have been invested into public transport; however complaints about low service quality and unreliable transit system performance have increasingly arisen from all walks of life. Evaluating transit operational efficiency from various levels and designing incentive-based mechanisms to allocate limited subsidies/resources have become one of the most imperative challenges faced by responsible authorities to sustain the public transport system development and improve its performance and levels of service. After a comprehensive review of existing literature, this dissertation aims to develop a multi-dimensional framework composed of a series of robust multi-criteria evaluation models to assess the operational and financial performance of transit systems at various levels of application (i.e. region/city level, operator level, and route level). It further contributes to bridging the gap between transit efficiency evaluation and the subsequent subsidy allocation by developing a set of incentive-based resource allocation models taking various levels of operational and financial efficiencies into consideration. Case studies using real-world transit data will be performed to validate the performance and applicability of the proposed models

Transit productivity analysis in heterogeneous conditions using data envelopment analysis with an application to rail transit

This dissertation extends transit productivity analysis by developing a new method of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), the linear programming approach to productivity analysis. The new model analyzes productivity of transit working under heterogeneous operating conditions. It is named Two-Farrell DEA for it applies DEA in two stages, DEA (1), that calculates the productivity frontiers at given operating conditions and DEA (2), that uses inputs adjusted by multipliers calculated in DEA (l). The model Two Farrell DEA calculated productivity benchmarks for each rail transit agency and estimated its potential for higher revenue or lower expense improvement. Additionally, the results identify two production techniques of rail transit, the sources of increasing returns to scale, the degree of flexibility to changes in the shadow prices of the inputs, and a method to prioritize investment for expansion of operations. Its indirect contribution to transit operations planning consists of checking the consistency and feasibility of new rail projects. Moreover, this dissertation includes the first correlation analysis made between productivity and operating conditions related to network form, factor analysis of transit operating conditions, the comparison of results between the new model to four other methods, and the evaluation of the empirical accuracy of methods with cluster analysis