01520058

Component

Operating and maintenance (O&M) costs receive less attention than might be warranted, given that they recur each year as part of a transit agency’s budgeting process. A number of things can be learned from the annual O&M costs incurred by the existing streetcar and light rail transit (LRT) systems operating in North America. First and foremost among these is that modal average ‘unit costs’ for O&M can be very misleading. The range in O&M costs per passenger-mile (the most objective overall measure of the cost of providing transportation service per unit of service actually consumed) varies by almost two orders of magnitude (from about 12 cents to almost 6 dollars), and substantial variances exist within individual modes due to the factors mentioned above. For LRT (light rail transit) and streetcars, there are some significant economies of scale that drive down the O&M unit costs (per passenger-mile) between very small and very large systems. These can be better understood in terms of PTD (passenger traffic density), system size (route-miles), and ACS (average commercial speed). This paper explores these relationships based on data reported to FTA (Federal Transit Administration) and CUTA (Canadian Urban Transit Association) for the calendar year 2009, and identifies circumstances under which caution should be exercised in making generalizations about rail O&M costs.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP075 Light Rail Transit.

01503729

14-3041

English

12p

2014

Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References

Economies of scale; Light rail transit; Operating costs; Passenger traffic; Speed; Streetcars; Traffic density

Canadian Urban Transit Association; U.S. Federal Transit Administration

Canada; United States

Finance; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2014 Paper #14-3041

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 27 2014 3:03PM