Productivity Growth of Urban Transit Agencies in the U.S.

ABSTRACT

This article assesses the productivity of US urban public transit using data of 45 largest bus agencies and 32 rail agencies from years 2007 through 2017. The study shows that both bus and rail transit agencies have experienced declining cumulative productivity growth during the study period. The Malmquist productivity index was decomposed into technical efficiency change and technological change components and the findings indicate that, for bus transit agencies, outsourcing or purchased transportation is associated with negative efficiency change. Although purchased transportation has a positive effect on technological change for bus transit, the effect is not significant. The results suggest that transit agencies that seek to partner with shared-mobility service providers or to integrate shared-mobility with transit service must address challenges that hinder transit efficiency, and that transit technology has yet to keep up with technological progress in urban mobility.

KEYWORDS:

• Productivity
• purchased transportation
• public transit

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. “Micro transit is an emerging service model providing demand responsive or flexible-route trips in a defined service zone by matching customers to vehicles through real-time trip requests. It is intended to serve areas that are typically difficult for fixed-route transit to serve, such as low-density suburban development, and provide improved quality of service for riders” (Todd et al., 2018. P. 2).

2. Efficiency scores and productivity index from the model considering passenger miles as the output are similar to the ones reported in this study, and they are available from the authors upon request.

3. Detailed individual agency-level indexes of efficiency change, technological change and productivity change for bus and rail agencies are available from the authors upon request.