Public transit performance: What does one learn from frontier studies?

By B. de Borger, Kristiaan Kerstens, Á. Costa. 2002

263 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the literature on production and cost frontiers for public transit operators, and it evaluates the contributions of frontier analysis to the understanding of the performance of the public transport sector. The authors first succinctly contrast best practice (or frontier) and average practice specifications of technology. They also review relevant performance indicators and the methods to measure them. Next, the existing frontier studies measuring urban transit performance are systematically summarized and critically assessed. It is shown that the organization of the market, contract design, the degree and nature of the regulatory regime, and the characteristics of the network being served are all important determinants of inefficiency. However, although the frontier literature has substantially contributed to the knowledge of urban transit technologies and the determinants of performance, it is found that many important issues remain unresolved.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Strategy and Management, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/725db44d717bcaaa600422877a3764b0a1175e95

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Management Science and Operations Research

In Strategy and Management

In Transportation

Citations in the corpus

Efficiency of urban public transit: A meta analysis (2005, background): “A comprehensive survey of frontier methodologies and empirical results for urban public transport has recently been published (De Borger et al. 2002).”
Efficiency Measurement in the Port Industry: A Survey of the Empirical Evidence (2009, background): “Jara-Díaz et al. (1997) also obtain this result within the sphere of Spanish ports, after estimating a multi-output cost function.”
Ownership, Contractual Practices and Technical Efficiency: The Case of Urban Public Transport in France (2007, unknown): “De Borger et al. (2002), in a recent survey of frontier studies in the urban transport sector, reported that an important characteristic of empirical studies is the wide variability in the use of inputs and outputs in urban technology specifications.”
A Critical Analysis of DEA Applications to Seaport Economic Efficiency Measurement (2009, background): “( 2002 ) classify by functional form (parametric vs.”
Regulatory Contracts and Cost Efficiency: Stochastic Frontier Evidence from the Italian Local Public Transport (2006, methodology): “the vehicle-kilometers ( De Borger et al. 2002 ), the output measure we adopt allows us to weigh the specific characteristics of urban and intercity systems, as it takes also into account the average load capacity of the fleet.”
Efficiency and productivity (2008, unknown): “26 Much has been made of this property of the Debreu-Farrell measures, but we think the problem is exaggerated. The practical significance of the problem depends on how many observations lie outside the cone spanned by the relevant efficient subset. Hence the problem disappears in much econometric a”
Measuring the economic efficiency of airports: A Simar–Wilson methodology analysis (2008, background): “Benchmarking analysis is one of the ways to drive airports towards the frontier of best practices (De Borger et al., 2002).”
Yardsticks on the road: Regulatory contracts and cost efficiency in the Norwegian bus industry (2003, background): “In recent surveys of this literature, De Borger and Kerstens (2000) and De Borger et al. (2002) point out that most studies on transit company performance show that there are substantial technical inefficiencies among urban transport operators.”