| Over the past two decades operating costs have increased rapidly while productivity and resource utilization have declined in the transit industry. These developments along with the uncertainty surrounding the future availability of operating subsidies have led to an increased interest in the performance evaluation of the nation's transit systems.;Transit system operating efficiency is one of the elements in the set of dimensions comprising the overall system performance, and it deals with the degree to which transit system inputs are efficiently utilized in providing a given level of produced output.;This dissertation develops and examines specific measures of transit system efficiency for 86 single mode bus transit systems included in the fourth year (1982) Section 15 data base.;Direct comparisons among transit systems based on the values of the developed measures are deficient since they do not account for variations that are caused by factors describing the environment in which the transit system operates (i.e., service profile, socioeconomic, regional,) and which are beyond the system operators' control. This dissertation examines the effect that these environmental factors have on the systems' efficiency, by performing cross-sectional analysis on 86 transit systems, using the statistical method of regression analysis, with the system characteristics and environmental factors acting as the independent variables and the specific cost components expressing the efficiency measures as the dependent variables.;The obtained results reveal the influence of these factors on all unit cost and resource consumption measurements. The transit systems are then evaluated on the basis of their operational performance as a whole, and on the specific cost components as well. It is this evaluation that makes this research useful as a diagnostic tool, giving transit system managers the opportunity to use the developed models for an assessment of their system's comparative efficiency, and to diagnose the components where inefficiency occurs, so that remedial actions may be taken. |
