Conditions and Performance Chapter Listing

Conditions and Performance Home Page

Introduction

Impact of Highway and Bridge Investment on Conditions and Performance

Transit Investment Impacts

Methods for Increasing Future Investment for Transportation Projects

Unlike HERS, TERM does not model transit demand responses to infrastructure investments and the reduction in user costs which they provide (see Appendix I). Accordingly, it is impossible to deter-mine how achieving the investment levels targeted by TERM and discussed in Chapter 7 would affect transit ridership and user costs. Instead, the causality runs the other direction: at the forecast annual transit PMT growth rate of 1.9 percent, the asset expansion investments would accommodate an increase in annual transit passenger miles from 40.2 billion in 1997 to 58.7 billion in 2017 while maintaining the same level of performance that existed in 1997.

Transit Investment and Historical Trends

Exhibit 9-6

Current Capital Spending Levels versus Rehabilitation and Replacement Needs, 1993-1997

As indicated in Chapter 3, the average condition of bus vehicles has been relatively constant over the last several years, while the average condition of the aging rail vehicle fleet (particularly the heavy rail vehicle fleet) has declined. As Exhibit 8-15 indicates, previous reports have estimated that then-current capital spending levels would fall well short of the amount required to maintain both conditions and performance. However, these amounts have been slightly higher than the pure replacement and rehabilitation levels, as shown in Exhibit 9-6. Over the same 10-year period (1987-1997), the two primary system performance measures, average speed and vehicle utilization rates, have also been relatively constant (see Chapter 4). Thus, actual conditions and performance (with the possible exception of heavy rail vehicles) do not appear to have been strongly affected by the funding gap.