ADVANCED VEHICLE MONITORING AND COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS FOR BUS TRANSIT: BENEFITS AND ECONOMIC FEASIBILITY

Abstract

This report analyzes the feasibility of advance motor vehicle monitoring and communication (AVMC) systems for bus transit in the United States. Such systems are widely used in Europe and Canada to provide more reliable and efficient bus services, but have seen little deployment in the U.S. Many systems are now available from both American and foreign vendors, and thus the question of whether or not to deploy such a system is coming to the forefront inn many transit agencies. In this report, the potential benefits of such a system are discussed, including benefits to current and new riders in the form of better service, to the agency in the form of increased revenues and reduced costs, and to ccommunities in a variety of ways includidng town Watch functions. This sets the stage for a discussion of the actual experince of foreign and domestic agencies that have introduced such systems with both costs and benefits. A method for evaluating the feasibility of AVMC systems is presented, for both outright purchase and for leasing - a very attractive alternative that conserves scarce capital resources. Calculations for typical U.S. conditions suggest that these systems should be quite cost effective, improving both agency finances and passenger satisfaction. Agencies should consider them carefully.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.