This article summarizes price elasticities and cross-elasticities for use in public transit planning. It describes elasticities and how they are used, and examines previous research on transit elasticities. Commonly used transit elasticity values are largely based on studies of short- and medium-run impacts performed decades ago when real incomes where lower and a larger portion of the population was transit dependent. As a result, they tend to be lower than appropriate to model long-run impacts. Analysis based on these elasticity values tends to understate the potential of transit fare reductions and service improvements to reduce problems, such as traffic congestion and vehicle pollution, and understates the long-term negative impacts that fare increases and service cuts will have on transit ridership, transit revenue, traffic congestion, and pollution emissions.

This article investigates the value transit travelers place on qualitative factors, such as comfort and convenience, and practical ways to incorporate these factors into transport planning and project evaluation. Conventional evaluation practices generally assign the same time value regardless of travel conditions, and so undervalue comfort and convenience impacts. More comprehensive analysis of transit service quality tends to expand the range of potential transit improvement options, and justify more investments in transit service quality improvements. This article examines the value passengers place on transit service quality, summarizes research on travel time valuation, explores how transit service quality factors affect travel time values and transit ridership, and discusses implications of this analysis.

This article investigates various ways that transportation policy and planning decisions affect public health and better ways to incorporate public health objectives into transport planning. Conventional planning tends to consider some public health impacts, such as crash risk and pollution emissions measured per vehicle-kilometer, but generally ignores health problems resulting from less active transport (reduced walking and cycling activity) and the additional crashes and pollution caused by increased vehicle mileage. As a result, transport agencies tend to undervalue strategies that increase transport system diversity and reduce vehicle travel. This article identifies various win-win strategies that can help improve public health and other planning objectives.

Active mode (walking, bicycling, and their variants) users are exposed to various negative externalities from motor vehicle traffic, including injury risks, noise, and air pollutants. This directly harms the users of these modes and discourages their use, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of less active travel, more motorized travel, and more harmful effects. These impacts are widely recognized but seldom quantified. This study evaluates these impacts and their consequences by measuring the additional distances that bicyclists travel in order to avoid roads with heavy motor vehicle traffic, based on a sample of German-Austrian bicycle organization members (n = 491), and monetizes the incremental costs. The results indicate that survey respondents cycle an average 6.4% longer distances to avoid traffic impacts, including injury risks, air, and noise pollution. Using standard monetization methods, these detours are estimated to impose private costs of at least €0.24/cycle-km, plus increased external costs when travellers shift from non-motorized to motorized modes. Conventional transport planning tends to overlook these impacts, resulting in overinvestment in roadway expansions and underinvestments in other types of transport improvements, including sidewalks, crosswalks, bikelanes, paths, traffic calming, and speed reductions. These insights should have importance for transport planning and economics.

This report describes and evaluates 18 potential local funding options suitable for financing public transportation projects and services. They are evaluated according to eight criteria, including potential revenue, predictability and sustainability, horizontal and vertical equity, travel impacts, strategic development objectives, public acceptance and ease of implementation. This is a somewhat larger set of options and more detailed and systematic evaluation than most previous studies. This study discovered no new options that are particularly cost-effective and easy to implement; each has disadvantages and constraints. As a result, its overall conclusion is that a variety of funding options should be used to help finance the local share of public transit improvements to ensure stability and distribute costs broadly.