Development of a Web-Based Information System for Integration and Analysis of Multiple-Year National Transit Database (NTD)

The National Transit Database (NTD) collected by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) includes data on transit organization characteristics, vehicle fleet size and characteristics, revenues and subsidies, operating and maintenance costs, safety and security, vehicle fleet reliability and inventory, and services consumed and supplied. These data have been used extensively to derive values for transit performance measures and have become the sole source of standardized and comprehensive data for use by all constituencies of the U.S. transit industry. An important application of the NTD has been to perform trend analysis that requires multiple years of the NTD data. However, accessing multiple-year data was a very tedious process as these data were collected and distributed annually on separate files. This paper introduces a web-based information system that integrates over 20 years of NTD data and provides user-friendly tools for easy data access, summary, display, and reporting. Building on the success of a popular desktop version, the system supports quick data analysis that includes both trend analysis and peer comparisons.