Associated with the McGinn Campaign but useful to anyone, there’s a great Obamaesque idea website for voting on Seattle’s priorities. It’s called Ideas for Seattle, and is worth a few minutes spent voting or even creating your own ideas. Note that there are several great transit ideas including one to create more bus lanes (posted by yours truly) and the poorly named “Build the Green Line” which is actually about adding trolley buses.
Hat tip to [joshuadf] who pointed to the Ideas site in the comments.
While services like OneBusAway might seam to be a nicety a 2006 study commissioned by the Federal Transit Administration shows that real-time arrival information systems produce significant and quantifiable benefits that exceed project costs. The paper, Real-time Bus Arrival Information Systems Return-on-Investment Study (I highlighted and added notes to the interesting parts), documents how a comprehensive Return on Investment (ROI) study should analyzes the costs and benefits of real-time information systems. For demonstration purposes part of the ROI study was applied to Portland’s Transit Tracker system. Not all benefits were quantified and extremely conservative user rates were assumed (ex. Transit Tracker usage for MAX trips were not included).
ROI assuming shorter wait times only
To summarize the results of the paper see the graph above. The white area show when the annualized cost of the system exceeds the annualized user benefits of the system. In contrast, all non-white areas indicate where the system pays off. The horizontal axis shows the average reduction in wait times and the vertical axis shows the annual number of trips that Transit Trackers is used for. The darker the shading the large the ROI. By finding the intersection point of reduced wait time and annual transit tracker usage you can see when it yields benefits. As you can see the report conservatively estimates that as long as users of the system on average save 30 seconds a trip this system pays off.
