Restructuring of intercity bus services has resulted in a shift away from serving rural communities to linking major cities and urbanized areas. Rural areas formerly served by these services are now lacking connections to the national intercity bus network. FTA Section 5311(f) funding is available to provide planning, capital, and operating assistance for intercity bus services serving rural areas. However, many states and rural (regional and local) operators are unsure about the potential demand for rural intercity bus service and how that demand might vary. Research was needed to develop tools for forecasting rural intercity bus ridership for use by both service providers and state transportation program managers. Under TCRP Project B-37, KFH Group was tasked to develop a sketch-planning guide and supporting tools that could be used by state transportation department program managers and both public and private rural intercity bus service providers to forecast demand for rural intercity bus services. The study team accomplished the research objectives by (1) conducting stakeholder interviews of federal and state officials, industry and professional associations, key intercity carriers, consultants, and others to determine the current state of demand forecasting and identify examples of existing rural intercity services that were contacted to obtain service descriptions and ridership data; (2) conducting surveys of rural intercity projects to get details on the nature of the project, including service characteristics, service area, ticketing and information, ridership (including trends), and forecasting methods used to plan the services; (3) identifying and evaluating existing rural intercity bus forecasting methods from information supplied by stakeholders, providers, and the literature; (4) developing a sketch-planning guide and supporting tools, data, and methodologies to enable users to forecast rural intercity bus ridership; and (5) providing a final report and Microsoft® PowerPoint presentation to document the research process and the forecasting tools. The toolkit can assist service providers in answering questions such as: What is the potential ridership for different routes serving different population centers? Would the ridership vary if the service provider is an intercity bus company as compared to another type of transit operator? What is the ridership impact of connecting to an airport? The toolkit can assist state transportation program managers by providing ridership estimates that are needed to answer questions such as: How do the proposed services affect prioritization of resources? Does demand justify the requested subsidies? How do the proposed services fit into the overall long-range state or regional transportation plans? The supporting tools are included on the accompanying CD-ROM that uses Microsoft Word and Excel files to enable the user to define potential routes, estimate ridership, and make adjustments to those estimates. Both a regression model and a trip rate model are employed, and both require U.S. Census data to be plugged into a formula. The CD-ROM includes the required Census population data for all urbanized areas (over 50,000 persons), urban clusters (2,500 to 50,000 persons), and Census-designated places (under 2,500 persons) from the 2000 Census. This report includes (1) the final report, which documents the development of the toolkit, including a review of existing intercity bus ridership estimation techniques; documentation of the survey process used to collect data on ridership; and service characteristics of rural intercity routes; (2) the accompanying CD-ROM, which includes the Rural Intercity Bus Service Demand Model and supporting data; and (3) a set of instructions for using the CD-ROM. A Microsoft PowerPoint presentation that provides some background on the model and a worked example showing how to estimate ridership on a proposed rural intercity bus route is available on the TCRP Project B-37 web page (apps.trb.org/cmsfeed/TRBNet ProjectDisplay.asp?ProjectID=1591). (Author/publisher) This report is available online at http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/tcrp/tcrp_rpt_147.pdf
Samenvatting