Abstract
In many countries, bus operators are private companies whose service has been leased by government agencies. These agencies develop service compliance indices or measures to keep track of factors such as passenger satisfaction, frequency, and regularity but do not necessarily include the objectives of the operators in the assessment. In this paper, we used slack-based measure data envelopment analysis (SBM) to investigate whether it is possible for a bus operator to be efficient (from a private perspective) and match required standards of frequency and regularity. In doing so, data collected from two major bus operators in Santiago, Chile has been used comprising 99 services. The results show that when private objectives, namely revenues, are included in the analysis, bus operators do not necessarily seek to improve the regularity of their service. Moreover, it was found that some bus services are on the efficient frontier while keeping low performance measure standards. Using the shadow prices of the models, it was also found that improving the performance measures will be hard for many bus services unless there is a significant change in factors that are not under control of the operators (i.e., number of stops, length of the route, etc.). This shows the difficulty of correctly aligning the private objectives of operators with agencies’ objectives.
Highlights
Regularity and frequency are two of the key factors in the success of a bus transportation system
The ICF measures the effective frequency delivered by each service in each direction, while the incentive to provide a regular service (ICR) is based on the coefficient of variation (CV) and measures the regularity [1]
The ICF is constructed as the percentage of programmed bus trips effectively satisfied (1.0=100% of compliance), and the ICR converts ranges of the CV into values between 0 and 1.0, with 1.0 being the maximum compliance
Summary
Regularity and frequency are two of the key factors in the success of a bus transportation system. The ICF measures the effective frequency delivered by each service in each direction, while the ICR is based on the coefficient of variation (CV) and measures the regularity [1] In both cases, the indicators vary from 0 to 1.0 as they are basically evaluated as percentage of compliance with established values. By using the shadow prices of the DEA models, it was found that improving the ICR compliance service measure to achieve the required standard implies the addition of resources and a “change of technology”. That makes this improvement impractical as these are factors that are not under control of the operators.
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