As more and more transit agencies look to advanced technology to help improve their operational efficiencies and provide better service, and as funding levels either stay relatively constant or decline, cost/benefit analyses are becoming a more important element in the justification of new technology deployment both for transit agencies and their funding sources. This increased emphasis on cost/benefit justification has drawn increasing attention to the challenges associated with performing a sound, comprehensive, understandable and believable analysis for a particular transit property. This paper discusses these challenges in three parts: the availability of cost/benefit data; the complexity associated with using the available data; and the development of a credible, sufficiently detailed cost/benefit analysis that will be used by an agency to justify technology procurement and deployment. The paper uses a representative cost/benefit analysis conducted by the authors for the Fort Worth Transportation Authority regarding its planned ITS implementation to illustrate these challenges. (A*)
Samenvatting