NextBus Research Results Flag Top Transit Concerns & Technologies

Filed Under AVL Systems, Best Practices, Municipal Transit, Research, Transit Trends, Transportation Trends

We have just completed a research study among municipal transit executives designed to determine key trends and technologies as of August 2008. The study covers a broad range of transit systems from very large to very small.

Here are key findings:

37% have seen more than a 10% increase in ridership over the past six months
32% operate more than 100 transit vehicles
68% carry more than one million passengers annually
Only 4% have seen any decrease in ridership
34% are outsourcing transit operations
38% have more than 25 bus routes
53% have 250 or more bus stops

We also examined the importance of various challenges these transit executives face in running their systems. We asked them to rank on a scale of one to 10 (with 10 being extremely important) a large list of possible issues. Below are those issues that ranked 8 or higher on the 10 point scale:

Most Important Issues Facing Transit Executives

To run an efficient, on-time system	89%
To ensure regulatory compliance with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, Federal Transit Administration or other government bodies	82%
To provide a highly predictable route system	81%
To gather highly accurate ridership and other operations performance data	78%
To promote environmentally friendly transportation alternatives	78%
To improve the quality of community life	77%
To cope with significantly increased cost of fuel	77%
To increase ridership	76%
To reduce costs without compromising service quality	76%
To maintain bus headways	74%

We also asked these executives what technologies they are currently employing within their systems. The table below shows the 10 most pervasive technologies in use.

Top 10 Transit Technologies

On board video and audio recording	60%
Automatic vehicle location systems	56%
Automatic passenger counters (infrared, break-Beam, etc.)	41%
Computer aided dispatch	41%
Operations planning with geographical information systems (geo-coded data)	37%
Automatic audible/visual passenger stop announcing systems	36%
Real Time passenger information systems	33%
Transit management software	26%
LCD Mobile data terminals	23%
Smart-card transit media	20%