| Summary |
Agnes K. Y. Chiu, 2007,06
Institute of Traffic and Transportation National Chiao Tung University
The issue of efficiency evaluation for bus transit has been extensively studiedby transport economists; however, they ignored the effects of undesirable outputs, such as accidents, on the efficiency measurement. While producing the desirable outputs -- transport services, a bus transit in practice also accompanies with some undesirable by-products, such as pollutants and accidents, which would downgrade the environments and even cause the properties or lives loss. As these undesirable by-products are never freely disposable, measuring its productive efficiency without adjustment of their negative effects would be biased. It is therefore important to incorporate both desirable and undesirable outputs into a model to assess the bus transit efficiency in an impartial manner. This thesis attempts to investigate if the productive efficiency of a bus transit is significantly influenced by accidents involved.
Both desirable output and accident rate are incorporated into a stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) model. A panel data of ten Taipei Bus Transit firms over 2001 to 2006 is drawn for the case study, wherein vehicle-kilometer is selected as the desirable output, accident rate (without distinguishing severity) and aggregated accident score (with distinguishing severity by converting fatality, major injury, minor injury, and property loss only into proper weighted score) as the undesirable output, and fleet size, fuel, and labor as the inputs. Our findings indicate that there exists significant inefficiency in the Taipei bus transit industry as a whole. The productive efficiency with adjustment of undesirable accidents (either without or with distinguishing the severity) is significantly different from that measured withoutadjustment of accident effects. It suggests that ameliorating the operational safety is one of the effective means to promote the efficiency of bus transit. |
