The measurement and causes of unreliability in bus services.

This work was completed for the UK Confederation of Passenger Transport. It defines the way in which bus service reliability can be measured and presents the results of surveys of reliability conducted on six different, prototype bus services. The surveys show how and why unreliability arises and the paper explores how reliability can be improved by operational management measures alone. It then considers whether the reliability standards set for the bus industry by the Traffic Commissioners in 1999/2000 were realistic. The paper finally considers the packages of concerted actions likely to be necessary to deliver really reliable bus services. For the covering abstract see ITRD E124693.