Improving the Efficiency and Efficacy of Benchmarking Transit Level of Service Indicators in Resource-Constrained Environments

Although the utility of transit level-of-service indicators for transit planning and management is well known, the procedures for generating these indicators have not evolved for many years. Generation of accessibility or performance indicators, for example, typically require resource- intensive methods that are beyond the reach of many cities, especially in developing countries. But what if transit indicators were easy to generate? How could that change the way transit agencies evaluate their systems or propose improvements? Using a newly developed open-source tool, Open Transit Indicators, the World Bank’s Open Transport Team has combined GTFS-formatted transit data sets with GIS census data to derive globally comparative transit service, performance, and accessibility indicators. Using this methodology, the team undertook a pilot study in Zhengzhou, China, to use indicators to inform transit planning, as well as a global benchmarking study, comparing indicators across 12 cities.