Rural and Urban Transit District Benchmarking—Effectiveness and Efficiency Guidance Document

Rural and urban transit systems have sought ways to compare performance across agencies, identifying successful service delivery strategies and applying these concepts to achieve successful results within their agency. Benchmarking is a method used to accomplish this goal. Benchmarking is a means of comparing performance to an established performance baseline. Benchmarks are typically established through the process of identifying successful business practices through performance measurement. This guidance document establishes peer groupings for rural and urban transit districts, calculates effectiveness and efficiency factors within the peer groups, and identifies transferable elements of high performers that may provide transit districts information applicable to improve their own performance. The goal of this guidance document is to help rural and urban transit districts better understand and set targets for performance, increasing the return on federal and state transit investment.