Rail and road public transport: Cooperation or coexistence?

How Does Operational Environment Influence Public Transport Effectiveness? Evidence from European Urban Bus Operators

“…Merkert et al [48] performed a DEA global benchmarking exercise to compare performance of 58 bus rapid transit systems and pointed out population density, status of ownership and number of stations as serious explanatory factors of cost-effectiveness. Georgiadis et al [14] developed a conditional non-parametric setting to highlight population density as a critical exogenous determinant of bus PT effectiveness within a sample of 34 multimodal PT systems worldwide.…”

“…To construct this model, we selected the number of bus vehicles as an indicator of physical inputs (x 1 ), the number of total vehicle kilometers as an indicator of the produced services (x 2 ) and the number of passenger boardings as a variable that represents the amount of consumed services (y). The simultaneous combination of all these three variables into a production model allows the development of a combined effectiveness production model [14,33]. In terms of cost-effectiveness (operator's point of view), our model's inputs, i.e., the number of bus vehicles and vehicle kilometers, reflect a great deal of the expenses required for producing PT services, while our model's output, i.e., passenger trips, is associated with the acquired revenue.…”

“…in formulating our initial hypotheses for all 16 exogenous variables regarding the sign of their influence on bus PT effectiveness (last column of Table 2). In short, urbanized areas with increasing population numbers should generally favor PT [14,20,22]. There were studies [40] that highlighted comparatively greater PT use by women.…”

“…However, in the PT sector, as with any other industry, the management practices not only shape effectiveness levels but also the external environment in which the respective organizations operate. The exogenous or external variables are the variables that may influence the execution and effectiveness results of PT operations but without being under the direct control of the respective PT agencies [13][14][15]. Variables such as the type of service area [16], type of ownership [17,18], structure of PT network [12,17,19], population density [20][21][22] and traffic congestion [17,23] are only some of the external variables that scholars have discussed regarding their influence on PT performance (effectiveness is the one of the two basic elements of PT performance, the other being efficiency [4,5]).…”

“…During the last decade, this method was gradually adopted in order to investigate the impact of exogenous variables on production processes, which refer to a wide range of industries and disciplines including, inter alia, the educational sector [27], the financial sector [28], hospitals [29] and public services [30]. To the best of our knowledge, the order-m method is a relatively unexplored technique in PT research with very few applications so far [14]. Non-parametric techniques, in general, also avoid the weaknesses that are associated with indicators' comparisons (Fox's paradox) [31][32][33], which have been previously used for PT sustainability assessments [2,3].…”