Sampling and Estimation Techniques for Estimating Bus System Passenger-Miles

Most U.S. bus systems conduct on-off counts on a sample of vehicle-trips to estimate annual passenger-miles, which must be submitted to the National Transit Database. The required sample size depends on the techniques used. This paper reviews alternative methods, including simple random sampling, ratio estimation with a variety of possible auxiliary variables, stratified sampling, cluster sampling, and combinations of these approaches. Most of these alternatives take advantage of electronic registering fareboxes to obtain complete counts of boarding passengers. Seven alternative estimation techniques are compared in a case study of Santa Cruz Metro. The most efficient approach combined two techniques, stratified sampling and ratio estimation using the combined ratio technique. The latter technique used on-off data from a sample of trips to estimate the ratio of passenger-miles to potential passenger-miles, a newly proposed auxiliary variable. This approach reduced the sampling burden by over 80% compared with both simple random sampling and a sampling method published by the Federal Transit Administration.

Language

  • English

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Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01022782
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Files: TRIS, ATRI
  • Created Date: Apr 13 2006 2:59PM