The Effect of Service Scale on Bus Ridership: How does the Elasticity Vary by City Size?

The expansion of service scale is usually considered to bring an increase in transit ridership since the provision of more service usually means better service quality. For cities with different sizes, however, service scale may exhibit quite different effects on ridership. Previous studies of the transit ridership have tended to treat cities as a set of similar ones that have the same impact, and have conducted analyses for the entire range of city size using a single regression function. This may have caused problems in the interpretation of analysis results because cities of different sizes that may have different travel features and transit supply-demand relationships have been treated as a homogeneous data set. The objective of this paper is to investigate the variation of bus ridership with respect to service scale (indicated by fleet size) in Chinese cities of different sizes. A significantly large panel data of more than 600 cities constructed from the China Urban Construction Statistics Yearbook from 2001 to 2008 were applied. Cities were classified into eleven groups based on population and Pooled Regression Models were established for the entire dataset and each city group separately. The results showed a significantly positive correlation between ridership and service scale for both the entirety and each group. Meanwhile, calibration results showed quite different elasticity estimates of ridership with respect to service scale for different groups, ranging from 0.483 to 1.376. Then, three categories of cities were identified according to the estimated elasticities: population smaller than 400,000 (elasticities slightly less than 1), population between 400,000 and 800,000 (elasticities higher than 1) and population larger than 800,000 (elasticities far less than 1). The findings suggest that the effect of service scale on bus ridership is not uniform and varies greatly by city size. Cities with different population should make different strategies in bus development.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP010 Transit Management and Performance.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Chen, Xiaohong
  • Zhang, Jiangman
  • Tu, Yingfei
  • Zhang, Bin
  • Liu, Shouyang
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 18p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Bus travel; Cities; Elasticity (Economics); Level of service; Regression analysis; Ridership; Urban population
• Uncontrolled Terms: Fleet size
• Geographic Terms: China
• Subject Areas: Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01516436
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-0477
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 28 2014 1:32PM