A MODEL TO ASSESS POLICY EFFECTS ON TRANSIT PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT

Faced with increasing costs and declining federal subsidies, the urban mass transportation industry has been forced to carefully examine and justify all aspects of their operation. This has created the need for transit operating agencies to utilize performance indicators to assess system operation on a route-specific basis. Previous applications of performance indicators have uncovered a need to systematically evaluate such quantitative measures with respect to their ability to measure transit operations and the impact of different strategies of operation on this ability. Past efforts in computer modeling have also ignored this need by focusing on the classic urban transportation planning process.; This thesis presents the development and implementation of a methodology to assess the effects of operating strategies or "policies" on transit performance measurement. Secondary objectives include an investigation of the sensitivity of some commonly used performance indicators to transit operating characteristics and to culminate previous research efforts in this area. The approach entails the development of analytical relationships depicting transit supply and demand characteristics and using these to derive expressions for a selected set of performance indicators. The relationships are also used to formulate objective functions for various operating policies, which are then optimized to produce desired values of operating variables. Based on these values, standards for each performance indicator are computed and compared for different policies. A sensitivity of these results to variations in user estimated parameters is also included to verify the results.; The analysis is limited to three operating policies: minimum cost given demand, maximum net revenue given a fleet, and maximum ridership given a deficit. Several commonly used performance indicators are investigated. Optimizations are with respect to fare and headway as decision variables. Demand is modeled using an exponential demand model with fare and headway elasticity as parameters. A simplified unit cost model is used to depict expenditures on a vehicle-mile and vehicle-hour basis. All models within an interactive graphic computer environment enabling interactive route data entry and coding of routes over a base highway network. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of author.) UMI...