Efficiency and Effectiveness Studies for Performance Evaluation in Public Transport Systems

Abstract

Bus-based public transport systems are considered to provide affordable means of transport to trip-makers of urban and rural areas. The use of bus transport modes can help reduce traffic congestion and pollution on urban roads. However, the mode share of travel by public transport has witnessed a steep declined since the last 3 decades especially in the large cities with population of 4-8 million and above 8 million (MoUD, 2016). The major reasons for the decline in patronage of public transport modes include non-availability of services, inaccessibility, inadequate comfort and convenience, and poor reliability of services offered. Despite the limitations of the public bus transport system, it is still considered to be a viable mode of transport especially for the economically weaker sections of the society. Public transport undertakings are prone to making losses since these agencies focus on providing mobility to people on commercially viable routes, while providing accessibility and mobility to under-developed remote regions. For example, State Road Transport Undertakings (SRTUs) operating in India accrued a total loss Rs. 113.5 million for the year 2015-16. (MoRTH, 2016). The increasing cost of fuel and spares, increasing cost of labor, resource crunch on fund allocation in the form of subsidies, the lack of sufficient level of transparency in accounting, the rising trend in the use of private vehicles, coupled with the lack of computational tools for performing advanced in-depth analysis on performance-related aspects have affected the functioning of SRTUs leading to financial losses. In view of the need to satisfy the increasing travel demand of urban trip-makers, it is imperative to rejuvenate and promote public transport systems. The scope of the present work involves system evaluation of the performance of State Road Transport Undertakings (SRTUs) in India, with a special emphasis on micro-level performance evaluation of Mysore City Transport Division (MCTD), a part of Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KnSRTC). The overall approach adopted in this study for performance evaluation of SRTUs is expected to provide the basic framework for fine-tuning the functioning of similar organizations. These approaches will assist in identifying bottlenecks that need to be streamlined for improving the financial and physical performance of transport undertaking. In the initial phase of the study, a thorough understanding of important performance indicators was attained based on a comprehensive literature review on the use of efficiency and effectiveness measures in transport organizations. This was followed by a questionnaire survey where responses from experts in the field of transport operations, and academicians were elicited in order to rate the importance of various performance criteria in a scale of 1-9. The inputs from the experts were then processed using the AHP and the Fuzzy AHP approaches which gave similar results. Further analyses were performed using another Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approaches such as, TOPSIS, and Fuzzy-TOPSIS. A total of nine KPIs were identified for further analysis to evaluate performance of SRTUs at system level. The second phase of the study focused on conducting a system level evaluation of performance of various SRTUs across India with respect to cost efficiency, cost effectiveness, and service effectiveness. Suitable variables that had to be considered to represent the performance in the above-mentioned categories were selected using statistical tools such as the Akaike’s Information Criterion (AIC), and the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). The system level analysis of 31 SRTUs operating in Urban, Rural, and Hilly regions of India were carried out using parametric and non-parametric approaches. As part of the parametric approach, the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) method was adopted, while the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method was adopted as part of the non-parametric approach. Overall results indicated that SRTUs serving hilly regions performed poorly in all the three categories of performance evaluation. The third phase of the study involved the analysis of exogenous variables related to vehicle emissions and accidents as part of the performance evaluation using the DEA approach. In this part of the study, the performance of 25 SRTUs were evaluated for various time periods 2004-05, 2009-10, and 2014-15. The results indicate that CO2-PKM can be effectively used to represent the environmental sustainability of transport organization in the evaluation of SRTUs performance at system level. In the fourth phase of the study, a micro-level analysis related to 82 bus-routes out of a total of 842 routes operated by Mysuru City Transport Division (MCTD), a part of KnSRTC was performed. The QGIS open source software was used to identify the 82 routes based on route-length, and the direction of travel. The parameters representing micro-level performance such as route-length, number of bus-stops, revenue and passengers carried for each route, and so on were obtained using Structured Query Languages (SQL). The elimination of outliers in the database related to the computation of the journey times was performed using a program written in Python. The important variables to be considered in the micro-level analysis related to performance of bus-routes were identified using the principal component analysis (PCA) method, and the recursive feature elimination (RFE) approach using RStudio. The variables identified were then used to analyze the performance