Transit Performance Measures Research Articles

Incorporating equity into transit performance measures: A disaggregated bus route level approach

Marginalized communities usually experience inadequate public transport services in North America. Within these communities, buses play a vital role in everyday activity participation. Unfortunately, transport services that may advance equity by improving coverage and service for disadvantaged population groups and areas are often overlooked in transit planning since they usually underperform in ridership-based metrics.To address this problem, the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) introduced an equity service policy in 2019 to enhance bus services in vulnerable neighbourhoods known as Neighbourhood Improvement Areas (NIAs). This policy involves augmenting observed ridership counts for buses serving NIAs to improve or protect services for these communities. Although this proposed measure can improve bus services in NIAs, its current form might exclude other equity-deserving riders (EDRs) living outside NIAs, increasing their accessibility barriers.Our study uses quantitative and spatial analytical methods to better understand the equity impacts of this service policy change. We propose moving from the aggregate neighbourhood-based approach using NIAs to a more comprehensive and disaggregated person-based approach. First, we create an alternate method that identifies EDRs at the bus stop level using a fusion of census and travel survey data. We then explore the differences in augmented ridership levels created by the two approaches and evaluate whether the augmented ridership levels are likely to result in meaningful service changes using existing TTC service standards.We found that 2 out of 3 transit riders in Toronto are equity-deserving, with 72% residing outside NIAs. Our approach reveals increased ridership on routes with many EDRs, which receive minimal augmentation under the NIA-based method. Conversely, if all riders in NIAs are considered EDRs, our approach shows a 19% ridership overestimation equivalent to 35,245 users. Based on these results, we recommend creating a dedicated equity tool with an individual-centric focus, identifying areas with low transit service and high EDR percentages. This tool could then be integrated as an equity perspective into annual bus service planning.

Calculation of Transit Performance Measures Using Smartcard Data

Smartcard automated fare collection systems (SCAFC) for transit have been considered primarily for their administrative function of controlling access to the service and for revenue management. However, it is likely that data from these systems also can be used to describe both transport supply and demand. This article illustrates the use of smartcard data to estimate various transit performance measures. Combined with well-established evaluation processes, such measures can help operators monitor their networks in greater detail. The performance of the network supply (vehicle-kilometers, vehicle-hours, commercial speed, etc.) and the statistics on passenger service (passenger-kilometers, passenger-hours, average trip length, etc.) can be calculated from these datasets for any spatial or temporal level of resolution, including route and bus stop levels.

System for Transit Performance Analysis Using the National Transit Database

The National Transit Database (NTD) includes comprehensive data on transit organization characteristics, vehicle fleet characteristics, revenues and subsidies, operating and maintenance costs, vehicle fleet reliability and inventory, services consumed and supplied, and safety and security. Some of these data have been used extensively to derive values for transit performance measures and have become the sole source of standardized and comprehensive data for use by all constituencies of the U.S. transit industry. An important application of NTD data has been in trend analysis, which requires multiple years of data. However, accessing NTD data, especially for multiple years, has not been an easy process. One reason is because the data were collected and distributed annually in separate files. This paper introduces a web-based system that integrates over 20 years of NTD data and provides user-friendly tools designed to facilitate the access and analysis of transit performance data.

Implementation of Some Remedial Actions to Improve the Performance and Level of Transit Service for Public Transport Bus Routes in Baghdad City

The objective of this study was to improve level of transit service of public transport bus routes in Baghdad city through the implementation of some remedial actions. Eight public transport bus routes were selected to evaluate and improve the Level of Transit Service (LOTS). These routes represent Al-Tahrir bus network (A) which was located in the center of Baghdad city (capital of Iraq). The suggested remedial actions include reduction of legal bus stops delay (B), the elimination of illegal bus stops delay (b), the elimination of signalized intersections delay (I), and the reduction of traffic congestion delay (C). These suggested remedial actions are leaded to improve the values of total delay, bus travel time, service frequency (headway), adjusted running speed, and capacity. The values of level of transit service for these transit performance measures were improved. The overall routes level of transit service were improved for bus routes No. (72, 36, 13, 114, 11, 30, 37, and 9) from LOTS (D, E, E, E, E, D, E, and E) to LOTS (C, D, C, D, D, C, D, and D) respectively. The overall network LOTS was improved from LOTS (E) to LOTS (D), indicating that the application of the suggested remedial actions was effective and suitable to improve the performance and Level of Transit Service for public transport bus routes in Baghdad city. Therefore, this study recommended to use the remedial actions which proposed by authors to improve level of transit service for others bus networks.

Transit Performance Measures for the Transportation Disadvantaged: An Equity Analysis

Transit Performance Measures for the Transportation Disadvantaged: An Equity Analysis

Performance Measures and Level of Transit Service Assessment of Public Transport Bus Network in Baghdad City during 2002-2003

Buses of General Company for Passenger Transport was the primary mode for public transportation in Baghdad City. This system suffers from many problems, part of which were related to bus routes, while the other part was related to the bus and its operators. These problems have a direct effect on the users of public transport buses. The objective of this study was to assess the performance of eight public transport bus routes which they represented by the Al-Tahrir bus network and adopting the level of the transit service method. Seven transit performance measures were selected in this study, such as bus travel time, hours of service during the day, service frequency (headway), total delay on the route, running speed of the bus, bus occupancy, and capacity of the route. The results of this study showed that bus routes No. (72, 36, 13, 114, 11, 30, 37, and 9) were operating at overall Level of Transit Service LOTS (D, E, E, E, E, D, E, and E) respectively, whereas the bus network (Al-Tahrir bus network) was operating at overall LOTS (E); therefore, the performance of Al-Tahrir bus network was not acceptable, and improvements were needed to increase the level of transit service of this network.

Effects of Timetable Change on Job Accessibility

Accessibility is seldom used as a performance measure when planning transit services. This study is conducted following introduction of new timetables intended to improve passenger throughput for Sydney’s transit services, but resulted in major delays throughout the system. Cumulative accessibility to jobs at 30-minute travel threshold before and after the timetable change are calculated between 8 and 9 am, to measure change in accessibility. The results show the person-weighted accessibility dropped by 3%, from 45,070 to 43,730, and 63.3% of the population’s access to jobs were adversely affected by timetable change. This study advocates for the inclusion of accessibility metrics into transit performance measures.

Evaluating the resilience and recovery of public transit system using big data: Case study from New Jersey

ABSTRACTAnalyzing resilience and vulnerability of public transit networks is extremely important in the context of natural disasters as they are essential for evacuation. In this study, the public transit systems in New Jersey based on their vulnerability, resilience, and efficiency during the recovery period following Hurricane Sandy were analyzed. Diverse traffic, infrastructure, events, and web-based sources of Big Data are applied. Due to the sparsity of public transit performance measures for vulnerability, recovery, and resilience, various measures from existing literature were adapted for public transit. Following Hurricane Sandy, the bus transit network of NJ Transit (NJT) recovered much faster than its rail network. This was observed because the road infrastructure recovered much faster as compared to rail and subway networks. Additionally, the most critical link for the NJT buses remained intact during the hurricane whereas rail and subway systems suffered loss of power for driving and signaling. Performance measures such as critical links identification, change in travel time, friability, and resilience triangles for specific bus routes on the NJT bus network were estimated. Transit agencies can use these measures and methodologies in planning and preparing for disasters to study route vulnerability and transit network resilience and standardize performance measures.

Development of a Data-Driven Platform for Transit Performance Measures Using Smart Card and GPS Data

To improve customer satisfaction and reduce operation costs, transit authorities have been striving to monitor transit service quality and identify the key factors to enhance it. The recent advent of passive data collection technologies, e.g., automated fare collection (AFC) and automated vehicle location (AVL), has shifted a data-poor environment to a data-rich environment and offered opportunities for transit agencies to conduct comprehensive transit system performance measures. However, most AFC and AVL systems are not designed for transit performance measures, implying that additional data processing and visualization procedures are needed to improve both data usability and accessibility. This study attempts to develop a data-driven platform for online transit performance monitoring. The primary data sources come from the AFC and AVL systems in Beijing, where a passenger’s boarding stop (origin) and alighting stop (destination) on a flat-rate bus are not recorded. The individual transit rider’s origin and destination can be estimated by utilizing a series of data-mining techniques, which are then incorporated into a regional-map platform for transit performance measures. A multilevel framework is proposed to calculate the network-level speed, route-level travel time reliability, stop-level ridership, and headway variance. These statistics are interactively displayed on a map through a simplified transit GIS data model. This platform not only serves as a data-rich visualization platform to monitor transit network performance for planning and operations, it also intends to take advantage of e-science initiative for data-driven transportation research and applications.

Beyond Generating Transit Performance Measures

In recent years, the use of performance measures for transit planning and operations has gained a great deal of attention, particularly as transit agencies are required to provide service under increasing demand and with diminishing resources. The widespread application of the technologies of intelligent transportation systems to transit encourages automating the generation of comprehensive performance measures. In Portland, Oregon, the local transit provider, Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon (TriMet), has been on the leading edge of the transit industry since it implemented its bus dispatch system (BDS) in 1997. The BDS comprises automatic vehicle location on all buses, a radio communications system, automatic passenger counters on most vehicles, and a central dispatch center. Most significant, TriMet developed a system to archive all its stop-level data, which are then available for conversion to performance indicators. In the past decade, TriMet has used this system extensively to generate performance indicators through monthly, quarterly, and annual reporting. TriMet generates a wide range of performance indicators, yet an opportunity remains to explore metrics beyond general transit performance measures (TPMs). On the basis of an analysis of 1 year of archived BDS data for all routes and stops, the power of using visualization tools to understand the abundance of BDS data is demonstrated. In addition, several statistical models are generated to demonstrate the power of statistical analysis in conveying valuable and new TPMs beyond what is currently generated at TriMet or in the transit industry in general. It is envisioned that systematic use of these new methods and TPMs can help TriMet and other transit agencies improve the quality and reliability of their service.

Transit Attractiveness: Systematic Approach to Transit Performance Measurement

Transit performance measures typically have focused on attributes of service supply, such as capacity, passenger loading, frequency, and reliability. These measures are effective in describing the quality of transit service available at a given location, but they do not describe how well transit serves actual passenger trips from that location to potential destinations. To support the Regional Transportation Authority's objective of increasing the total number of trips for which transit is an attractive travel alternative, a methodology was developed to evaluate the relative attractiveness of travel by public transit and personal automobile on a sample of origin-destination pairs throughout the Chicago, Illinois, metropolitan region. Transit attractiveness was computed by using a logit mode choice framework that compared the utility of travel by transit, auto, and park-and-ride for various components of travel time and travel cost. To make the comparisons as customer-focused as possible, travel utility be...

Transit Attractiveness

Transit performance measures typically have focused on attributes of service supply, such as capacity, passenger loading, frequency, and reliability. These measures are effective in describing the quality of transit service available at a given location, but they do not describe how well transit serves actual passenger trips from that location to potential destinations. To support the Regional Transportation Authority's objective of increasing the total number of trips for which transit is an attractive travel alternative, a methodology was developed to evaluate the relative attractiveness of travel by public transit and personal automobile on a sample of origin–destination pairs throughout the Chicago, Illinois, metropolitan region. Transit attractiveness was computed by using a logit mode choice framework that compared the utility of travel by transit, auto, and park-and-ride for various components of travel time and travel cost. To make the comparisons as customer-focused as possible, travel utility between the sampled origins and destinations was derived from actual automobile and transit itineraries generated by publicly available web-based trip planners. This paper describes the methodology and how it was applied in northeastern Illinois to identify ways to serve activity centers better by improving transit accessibility from many other places, and it discusses potential ways of generalizing the approach for use in other regions faced with similar challenges in planning transit systems.

Generating Transit Performance Measures with Archived Data

Measuring the performance of a transit system is the first step toward efficient and proactive management. Since 1990, the use of performance measures for transportation planning and operations has gained a great deal of attention, particularly as transportation agencies are required to provide service with diminishing resources. In the past, it was very difficult and costly to collect comprehensive performance data. Thus, until recently, the transit industry has relied on limited, general, and aggregate measures for reporting performance to external funding and regulatory agencies. In Portland, Oregon, the local transit provider (TriMet) has developed a bus dispatch system (BDS) consisting of automatic vehicle location, communications, automatic passenger counters, and a central dispatch center. Most significantly, TriMet had the foresight to develop a system to archive all of its stop-level data, which are then available for conversion to performance indicators. It is demonstrated that there are powerful ways in which the data collected by the BDS can be converted into potentially valuable Transit Performance Measures (TPMs). These TPMs have been proposed in the past but were not implemented because of data limitations. It is envisioned that systematic use of TPMs can assist a transit agency in improving the quality and reliability of its service, leading to improvements for customers and operators alike.

Model for Determining Optimum Bus-Stop Spacingin Urban Areas

This paper proposes a model that can be used to determine effectively a sub-optimal policy for bus-stop spacing in urban areas. Transit users are usually interested in minimizing their out-of-vehicle travel time. Conversely, transit operators are interested in minimizing their fixed operating cost. Often, transit operators are required to make transit highly accessible to their patrons, because they operate under stringent budgets. This paper demonstrates, from a sensitivity analysis, that proper spacing of stops can significantly improve the quality of transit service, and decrease travel time, headway, and fleet size (i.e., number of buses). The Highway Capacity Manual, which contains a library of formulas for analyzing various transit performance measures, does not adequately address transit-stop spacing as a primary operational parameter. It is postulated in this report that optimal spacing of bus stops can reduce operating costs by minimizing the required number of buses in service. The proposed model is derived from the fundamental relationships that exist among velocity, uniform acceleration/deceleration, and displacement, and among the average bus operating speed, headway, required fleet size, and potential system capacity. The model can serve as a valuable decision support tool for transit planners in determining suitable spacing of bus stops for prevailing network and traffic conditions.

Does Public Transit Counteract the Segregation of Carless Households? Measuring Spatial Patterns of Accessibility

Although local transit agencies struggle to keep pace with low-density urban development, most people who depend on transit continue to live in concentrated clusters at the core of metropolitan regions, becoming more distant to the variety of places they need to access. Standard transit performance measures fail to help local transportation agencies adapt their services to changes in demographics and urban form. Geographic information systems (GIS) provide a method for measuring transit service at the neighborhood scale while accounting for land-use changes. The first aim was development of a GIS-based accessibility indicator that is straightforward to calculate, easy to interpret, and flexible enough to use for employment and nonwork travel alike. The second objective was to introduce recent advances in spatial statistics to transportation planners to help them quantitatively assess changes in accessibility patterns over time. A case study is examined of accessibility to supermarkets in Syracuse, New York. The analysis finds that over 7,500 households, representing 12 percent of the city’s households, do not have reasonable access to supermarkets. Furthermore, using visual assessment of maps, aspatial database operations, and spatial statistical tests, the study provides statistically significant evidence that poor accessibility is associated both with low-income neighborhoods and with neighborhoods with disproportionately high populations of African Americans.

A multidimensional methodology for evaluating public transportation services

The conceptual and methodological bases of evaluating public transportation services are examined. Multiple measures of transit performance, including efficiency and effectiveness measures, service area characteristics and planning and design criteria, are proposed and tested against data gathered from 56 American transit agencies. The analysis supports a multidimensional conceptualization of performance that looks comprehensively at the entire span of evaluation including the context, process and outcome of the evaluation. The analysis also shows that in addition to achieving efficiency and effectiveness, transit performance could also lead to improvement in data utilization, and agency capabilities and public image. Furthermore, the outcome of performance analysis is more significantly affected by the use of standards and techniques, service area criteria and planning and design criteria, which contributed 85% of the explained variance. Operating criteria which have dominated current data collection efforts contributed 9.2%. It is recommended that service performance evaluation research be redirected toward the development of a multidimensional methodology that incorporates service design and toward the development of a multidimensional methodology that incorporates service design and area factors that influence the productivity and demand for transit.

Organizing for Local Energy Management: Early Lessons

expenditures per revenue vehicle hour; (4) revenue passengers divided by the service area population; (5) total passengers per vehicle; (6) revenue passengers per revenue vehicle hour; (7) operating expenditures divided by total passengers; (8) operating expenditures divided by revenue passengers; (9) percent of population served. State funded research includes: Gordon J. Fielding and Roy Glauthier, Distribution and of Subsidies in Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Irvine, September 1976, which considers funding allocation as a function of performance necessary because current subsidy systems do not encourage efficiency and more effective service; and State of California, Joint Legislative Audit Committee, Office of the Auditor General, Report to the California Legislature 295, Financing and Evaluating Public Systems in January 1977, which recommended a system for routinely measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of California's transit operations. Later the federal government funded further work, including Gordon Fielding, et al., Development of Indicators for Transit, Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Irvine, December 1977; and Ernest Fuller, Jr., Performance Measures for Public Service, State of California, December 1978 (CA-09-8001, DMT-033). Forty transit performance measures are evaluated and Caltrans experience with them is described in Herbert Drosdat, Transit Measures: Their Significance in Local Funding Allocation (University of Washington, Department of Civil Engineering, 1977, unpublished dissertation). 22. Some of the shortcomings of the productivity program, and a suggestion for change, are discussed in Judith Lamare, Can Assistance Policy Produce Improved Industry Performance, Journal, Volume 6, Number 4 (Fall 1980).

A decision model for evaluating transit pricing policies

Decision models that emphasize the relationship between control variables such as transit fares and performance measures like revenue and ridership can be of significant value to the transit manager's decision-making process. Since transit pricing has become a political issue, any transit fare model needs to examine the equity implications of proposed fare policies. To this end, the transit pricing decision model presented in this paper not only provides information on aggregate quantities such as revenue and ridership but more importantly, through use of the micro-simulation technique, facilitates analysis of the impact that various fare policies would have on selected groups of riders. The potential usefulness of the model is illustrated through an application to evaluate the impact of distance-based fare policies. The design of the model and supporting computer programs are, however, flexible enough to test a variety of fare structures and permit the model to be customized to a specific user's needs and data constraints.

Measuring the performance of transit systems

This paper reviews the need for the development of transit performance measures, in the light of recent legislation and public subsidy issues for public transportation in the United States. An evaluation framework is presented, which defines and distinguishes between the efficiency, effectiveness and impact of public transit efforts. The application of this framework in evaluating public transit investments, and the use of the performance measures obtained through the application of this framework, in the allocation of funds among systems is then discussed. Research needs with respect to data collection requirements, cross‐jurisdictional comparability, and the utility of the proposed performance measures for decision‐making are finally addressed.