01479131

Component

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has been used in this study to evaluate performance of major Indiana transit agencies. 2010 data on operational and financial performance were utilized to find out relative position of the agencies with respect to the best practice frontier. Total operating expenses, staff level, and total seat capacity of revenue vehicle fleet are used as the inputs while total ridership and total vehicle mile are used as the outputs to evaluate agency performance. Input oriented BCC-DEA method also yields estimates of the potential improvement, i.e., to reduce inputs of inefficient transit agencies in order to project those to best practice frontier formed by the efficient units. The ‘variable returns on scale’ method, BCC-DEA also suggests that a number of large as well as small fixed route transit agencies are found to be efficient and the average efficiency score for the 16 major transit agencies across Indiana is found to be 0.855 on a scale of 0 to 1. The study reveals how overall inputs could be proportionally reduced to produce the same level of outputs in order to make all the agencies efficient relative to each other. Finally, nonparametric hypothesis tests are performed to check if potential factors, difficult to deal with in the main DEA model, affect the ranking of the agencies. It is found that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that efficiency scores differ among agencies that differ in overall size and age of vehicles in the fleet. College town and non-college town transit agencies’ efficiency levels seem to be not differing statistically. Besides, there is insufficient evidence to reject the notion that percentage part-time staff does not make difference in efficiency ranking of transit agencies.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP010 Transit Management and Performance.

01470560

13-5299

English

15p

2013

Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Best practices; Economic efficiency; Fixed routes; Performance measurement; Public transit; Transit operating agencies

Data envelopment analysis

Indiana

Finance; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I10: Economics and Administration; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2013 Paper #13-5299

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Feb 5 2013 1:00PM