Toolkit for Estimating Demand for Rural Intercity Bus Services (2011) / Chapter Skim
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S U M M A R Y Purpose of Project The objective of this research project was to develop a sketch-planning guide and supporting tools that could be used by state transportation department program managers and both public and private rural intercity bus service providers to forecast demand for rural intercity bus services. The research approach documented in this report accomplished this objective by: • Conducting stakeholder interviews of federal and state officials, industry and professional associations, key intercity carriers, consultants, and others to determine the current state of demand forecasting and to identify examples of existing rural intercity services that were contacted to obtain service descriptions and ridership data.
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2funding to the states for use in maintaining or developing rural intercity services. This program subsequently codified as Section 5311(f)
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at the state level on service characteristics or ridership. Additional effort went into using other data sources such as websites and industry schedule guides to develop service characteristics.
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4Development of a Sketch-Planning Tool The process of developing demand estimation tools, even with a fairly large data set, proved to be more problematic than originally thought. Chapter 5 describes the efforts made and many of the issues that developed during this process.
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Where: Ridership = annual one-way passenger boardings Average origin population = sum of the populations of origin points (all points on the route except that with the largest population) Number of stops = count of points listed in public timetables as stops Airport service or connection = route serves an airport with commercial service either directly or with one transfer at a common location Intercity provider = service operated by a carrier meeting the definition of an intercity bus carrier (see Definition of Intercity Bus Service in Chapter 6)
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6The Toolkit The major product of this project was intended to be an easy-to-use toolkit to assist planners in estimating ridership on rural intercity routes. It was decided that the tools would best be provided on a CD with the models and their calculations embedded so that users would not have to deal with formulas or look up tables -- but would merely need to input data for a proposed route to get the model estimates.
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