Should Urban Transit Subsidies Be Reduced?

This paper derives intuitive and empirically useful formulas for the optimal pricing of passenger transit and for the welfare effects of adjusting current fare subsidies, for peak and off-peak urban rail and bus systems. The formulas are implemented based on a detailed estimation of parameter values for the metropolitan areas of Washington (D.C.), Los Angeles, and London. Our analysis accounts for congestion, pollution, and accident externalities from automobiles and from transit vehicles; scale economies in transit supply; costs of accessing and waiting for transit service as well as service crowding costs; and agency adjustment of transit frequency, vehicle size, and route network to induced changes in demand for passenger miles. The results support the efficiency case for the large fare subsidies currently applied across mode, period, and city. In almost all cases, fare subsidies of 50 percent or more of operating costs are welfare improving at the margin, and this finding is robust to alternative assumptions and parameters.transit subsidies, scale economies, traffic congestion, welfare effects

Should Urban Transit Subsidies Be Reduced?

This paper derives intuitive and empirically useful formulas for the optimal pricing of passenger transit and for the welfare effects of adjusting current fare subsidies, for peak and off-peak urban rail and bus systems. The formulas are implemented based on a detailed estimation of parameter values for the metropolitan areas of Washington (D.C.), Los Angeles, and London. Our analysis accounts for congestion, pollution, and accident externalities from automobiles and from transit vehicles; scale economies in transit supply; costs of accessing and waiting for transit service as well as service crowding costs; and agency adjustment of transit frequency, vehicle size, and route network to induced changes in demand for passenger miles. The results support the efficiency case for the large fare subsidies currently applying across mode, period, and city. In almost all cases, fare subsidies of 50% or more of operating costs are welfare improving at the margin, and this finding is robust to alternative assumptions and parameters.Transit subsidies; Scale economies; Traffic congestion; Welfare effects

Financing Urban Transit: An Analysis of Ontario Urban Transit Trends

This paper examines the public policy issue of transportation funding by analyzing the urban transit trends in Ontario regarding operating subsidies, ridership, service levels, cost and efficiency, revenue and fare, and productivity. The findings reveal that the elimination of provincial funding for urban transit in Ontario contradicts the integrated policy approach that is required for balanced urban transportation systems

A PROGRAMMING APPROACH TO URBAN TRANSIT PLANNING

Public Economics,

Metaheuristic approaches for urban transit scheduling problem: a review

Urban Transit Network Design Problem (UTNDP) focuses on deriving useful set of routes, manageable timetabling for each transit route and transit scheduling based on available resources. UTNDP is commonly subdivided into Urban Transit Routing Problem (UTRP) and Urban Transit Scheduling Problem (UTSP), respectively. There are various approaches applied to solve the UTSP. The aim of this paper is to give a comprehensive list of studies on UTSP that deals with metaheuristic approaches such as Tabu Search, Simulated Annealing, Genetic Algorithm and their hybrid methods. This review also addressed possible gaps of the approaches and the limitations of the overall problem. It can be concluded that only some of the metaheuristic approaches and sub-problems are highly studied in UTSP. This review will be useful for researchers who are interested in expanding their knowledge and conduct research in UTSP using metaheuristic approaches

Transit Technology Today

This keynote address was presented at the Symposium on Recent Developments in Urban Transit Technology in Taipei, Taiwan on November 27, 1984

Differential evolution for urban transit routing problem

The urban transit routing problem (UTRP) involves the construction of route sets on existing road networks to cater for the transit demand efficiently. This is an NP-hard problem, where the generation of candidate route sets can lead to a number of potential routes being discarded on the grounds of infeasibility. This paper presents a new repair mechanism to complement the existing terminal repair and the make-small-change operators in dealing with the infeasibility of the candidate route set. When solving the UTRP, the general aim is to determine a set of transit route networks that achieves a minimum total cost for both the passenger and the operator. With this in mind, we propose a differential evolution (DE) algorithm for solving the UTRP with a specific objective of minimizing the average travel time of all served passengers. Computational experiments are performed on the basis of benchmark Mandl’s Swiss network. Computational results from the proposed repair mechanism are comparable with the existing repair mechanisms. Furthermore, the combined repair mechanisms of all three operators produced very promising results. In addition, the proposed DE algorithm outperformed most of the published results in the literature

Employment in New York City's Transit and Ground Passenger Transportation Subsector

This is one of four profiles1 developed by the New York City Labor Market Information Service (NYCLMIS) about the transportation sector's top employment subsectors. The others are about air transportation, truck transportation, and support activities for transportation. This profile is intended to help workforce development account executives with business development and job placement, career advisors with job counseling, and education and training professionals with their activities in the transit and ground passenger transportation subsector. Jobseekers can also use this information to help with career decision-making. Icons appear throughout this profile to mark findings and recommendations of special interest to these respective audiences