APPROACH TO THE ECONOMIC EVALUATION OF PUBLIC TRANSIT SERVICES

This paper describes a project by the Capital Regional District in Victoria, British Columbia, aimed at establishing a consistent, ongoing framework for monitoring and evaluating existing services and to support the planning of short term service changes. The low-cost approach which was developed monitors ridership (from station counts and boarding/alighting counts), service supplied, operating costs and revenues (from several existing sources and maintained on internal files). The evaluation of the transit services was carried out on individual service components (i.e. route-time periods) to enable the relative performance of each to be assessed. Using two primary variables (operating cost per ride and revenue/cost), the wide variation in the economic performance of the different components of the system was clearly demonstrated. For the covering abstract of the conference see IRRD 286189. (TRRL)