Disaggregating Variability in Projected Benefits of Transit State of Good Repair Due to Uncertainty of Travel Demand Forecasts
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems
Volume 147, Issue 11
Abstract
Maintaining transit infrastructure in a state of good repair (SGR) is key to improving the sustainability of urban transportation. Insufficient SGR investments lead to the deterioration of transit agency assets and to declining service quality and a loss of ridership. Thus, a significant portion of the benefits of SGR investments are due to travel demand impacts, but the literature on this subject is extremely sparse. As a result, evidence and demand modeling tools to properly determine benefits of transit SGR investments are lacking. This paper quantifies the impact that this gap of knowledge has on SGR investment benefit forecasts. It presents a comprehensive sensitivity analysis to determine first-order and higher-order effects of travel demand variables on the variance in SGR benefit estimates, using 37 hypothetical investment scenarios. The results show that the variance attributable to uncertainty in travel demand forecasts is considerable and may skew investment decisions. It varies by SGR project type and may be reduced by addressing some of the variables with which travel demand forecasts interact.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code generated or used during the study are proprietary or confidential in nature and may be provided only with restrictions. Some of the scenarios were developed with agency data that were made available to the TCRP E-12 project team under the condition that the data remain confidential. Therefore, the scenario data cannot be shared. The code supporting the findings is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
We thank the Transportation Research Board for supporting TCRP Project E-12, and the project team that contributed to TCRP Report 206. Furthermore, we are grateful to the transit agencies that provided or published data used in this research.
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Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems
Volume 147 • Issue 11 • November 2021
Copyright
© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Dec 9, 2020
Accepted: Jun 21, 2021
Published online: Sep 11, 2021
Published in print: Nov 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Feb 11, 2022
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