State and local transportation officials constitute the primary intended audience for TCRP Report 27, Building Transit Ridership: An Exploration of Transit’s Market Share and the Public Policies That Influence It. This includes elected and appointed board members who deal with local transportation policy, transit agency officials, transit agency professionals, and metropolitan area transportation planners. The report addresses transit’s ridership and its share of the travel market. The research explored a variety of different public policies and transit management actions that can potentially influence transit ridership, particularly in comparison to local travel by private vehicle. The policies are presented through case studies, which are summarised in the report and documented in greater detail in the accompanying appendices. TCRP Project H-4A addressed transit ridership and its share of the local travel market. The research examined a number of different policies that might be pursued at a local or metropolitan area level, with or without federal or state government encouragement, that have some potential for increasing or maintaining transit’s market share. The policies examined in this project were diverse, ranging from transit system pricing and service adjustments (which can be carried out unilaterally by a transit agency) to initiatives that would affect land use development and the cost of automobile travel (which require significant interagency and possibly private sector co-operation). The strategies included in this project were ones viewed as having some potential for affecting transit ridership positively, but did not include certain promising policies — such as parking management and pricing — that are being addressed through other, concurrent TCRP studies. The report presents the current context for transit’s market share, describes public policies that affect the market share, and reviews traveller behaviour and its implications for transit. Having provided this framework, the report examines initiatives that may help to maintain or improve transit ridership, and summarises the major research findings. The report includes 14 appendices that present the research results in greater operational detail. Eight of the appendices are case studies of initiatives, carried out by transit systems in the United States and Canada, for which ridership gains were one of the explicit or implicit objectives. Each case study describes the transit system, presents a program or strategy, evaluates its impacts, and presents a summary and conclusions. The case studies were Metro-North’s Hudson Rail Link, GO Transit’s (Ontario) fare and service integration policies, the Twin Cities’ Team Transit program, Tidewater Regional Transit’s timed transfer system, Seattle’s U-Pass and Flexpass programs, Portland’s Fareless Square program, land use and transit co-ordination in Metropolitan Toronto, and pricing of road use (and other traffic limitation) strategies. Chapter 6 of the report presents cross-cutting impressions and observations drawn from the case studies. This chapter also addresses the transferability of the results to other locations. (A)
Abstract