Economic characteristics of the urban public transportation industry

In addition to presenting an overview of the economic conditions in the urban public transit industry as a whole, this project incorporated four papers that investigated separately the economic characteristics of the urban bus, rail rapid, commuter rail, and taxicab industries. Also included were three papers in which an econometric model of urban bus transit was developed, regulatory constraints and their implications were reviewed, and external effects of urban transit operations such as air and noise pollution and accident were analyzed. The analyses tended to be rather general, concluding that demand deficiency, especially for bus transit, was the main cause of the economic difficulties of urban transit systems.