Evaluating express bus service

Abstract

Express or limited-stop bus services are a competitive effort by transit agencies to provide higher quality service to customers who make longer trips and place higher premiums on travel time, convenience and comfort. While express routes usually share the same roadway with local, more conventional bus routes, they are intended to differ from local service by making fewer stops, running at higher operating speeds, offering greater comfort to customers, and making trips on a city- or region-wide scale. It can be difficult to accurately determine the success or failure of express service on a corridor with parallel local service if the evaluation process does not recognize differences in the purpose of each. This lack of clarity hampers the attempts of transit agencies to implement competitive bus services in areas where they may be most effective. A carefully designed evaluation process that recognizes these service role distinctions is necessary to provide an objective basis for decisions to provide higher quality services like express buses or Bus Rapid Transit. This thesis develops and proposes a normative framework for evaluating express bus services. The framework is applied to the express services of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), with particular attention paid to the Authority's experience on Western Avenue. Policy- and operations-level recommendations are provided to the CTA for evaluating express target markets, service design and operational performance.