Literature Review Report on Benefit/Cost Studies and Evaluations of Transit Management Systems

This study addresses the benefits and costs of Advanced Public Transportation Systems (APTS) applications in small and medium sized transit agencies using the research test implementation of a small transit oriented Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) on San Luis Obispo Transit as a case study. The Smart Transit System at San Luis Obispo is in a pre-commercialized state and implements the Efficient Development of Advanced Public Transportation Systems (EDAPTS) framework concept (Gerfen, 2001). The system has many potential benefits that will be identified and evaluated from a cost of service standpoint. The supporting hypothesis of this research is that small transit properties will be encouraged to deploy the EDAPTS ITS framework concept if the San Luis Obispo Smart Transit System can be shown to have a viable benefit-cost ratio.In order to deploy ITS applications, transit properties typically look for benefits and costs information about the services they are considering as well as documented lessons learned from the experiences of others. To be most effective, these inputs should be supplemented with information that describes the context from which the data were derived.Since the implementation of this EDAPTS Smart Transit System in 2001, only limited data analysis has been undertaken to evaluate the benefits of the system to riders, operators and the Cal Poly SLO community. A complete benefit-cost analysis is needed to provide small or medium sized transit properties with the economic justification of the EDAPTS framework deployment.This paper documents the literature review undertaken to summarize past work on evaluation of similar APTS applications and to identify and assess the analytic methods and tools available for the complete benefit-cost evaluation of SLO Transit Smart Transit System.