The Antiplanner has often called San Jose’s Valley Transit Authority (VTA) the nation’s worst transit agency (with some competition from DC Metro). It would be nice, however, to confirm that with hard data. The question is what are the best ways to measure agency performance?
A previous comparison of transit agencies used 23 different measures of performance. Some of these were outputs, such as trips per capita and farebox recovery. Most, however, were inputs, such as revenue miles, expenses per capita, and vehicle miles between failures. But inputs are not a sound measure of performance; an agency can spend a lot of money but carry few riders; it can run a lot of vehicle miles, but if they don’t go where people want to go, they are not serving the public well; it can have lots of breakdowns, but if people are still riding it, it must be doing something good.
So I want to focus on outputs, and I’ve tentatively identified four: Continue reading
