Measuring Access to Public Transportation Services: Review of Customer-Oriented Transit Performance Measures and Methods of Transit Submarket Identification

Abstract

This report synthesizes knowledge from existing literature relating to the interpretation and measurement of transit service quality from a customer-oriented perspective. The focus is on the evaluation of fixed-route transit systems. In addition, the authors review earlier studies that offer conceptual and operational ways of identifying different transit submarkets, their characteristics, and their varying activity and mobility needs. The review suggests that existing transit service delivery measures are limited in their capabilities of reflecting the ease with which different population subgroups are able to participate in their desired activities using transit. Future effort in transit service delivery modeling needs to develop separate indices for different population subgroups for different trip purposes. There should also be a mechanism to consolidate these indices into successively more aggregate measures and ultimately into a single generalized measure that represents the overall service level for a region.