EFFICIENCY AND EFFECTIVENESS OF URBAN PUBLIC TRANSPORT OPERATION IN SOME SELECTED CITIES

Abstract

In India bus is the principal mode of urban public transport because of it's door to door accessibility, flexibility and cheapness in comparision to other modes of transport available for urban mobility. The rapid rise in the bus ridership, growing cost of operation and various other socio-economic and political reasons causes enormous problem for the bus transit system to operate efficiently and effectively. In order to identify the weaker aspect of bus system operation and facilitate it's efficient mangement it is necessary to assess the performance of bus transit operation in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. In the present study an attempt has been made to assess the performance of fixed route bus transit system at three levels i.e. system level, sub-system level and route level. System level evaluation give the performance of the whole system of bus services in a city. It has been used to analyse the trend in performance over time of a city bus system and to compare the performance of various city bus systems. Sub-system level performance has been evaluated to see the variation in performance of various divisions of a city bus system. Seven performance concepts and their corresponding indicators have been identified for system and sub-system level performance evaluation. Route level. performance has been evaluated in terms of various parameters calculated from bus loading and journey time survey data. The trend analysis of performance over time -of various city bus services has shown that bus system r-oAtpkAt per unit of operating' expense has declined with passage of time whereas the indicator corresponding to vehicle efficiency has shown improvement with passage of time for all city bus systems considered. The comparative analysis of performance of various city bus services has shown that bus systems of small fleet- size are more cost efficient than large fleet size bus systems whereas service utilisation and vehicle efficiency has been found higher for large fleet size bus systems. The performance study of buses at route level has revealed that revenue generation in a bus trip depends on factors like route length, average pastenger lead and proportion of pass holders. However, these factors have been found to depend on the type of the trip i.e. whether the trip Performed is a peak trip or off peak trip. Thus the revenue generationmodel has been developed for peak and offpeak trips incorporating these factors: A Charative analysis of performance of Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) buses and 'Privately Operated (PO) buses under DTC have been done on the basis of route level performance parameters. It has been found that performance of PO buses and DTC buses are nearly the same.