Benefits and Costs

Some Reported Benefits

• Use of AVL-Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) improved on-time performance by 9-23% in large cities.
• Denver's Regional Transportation District (RTD) decreased schedule-related complaints by 26%.
• Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) saved $40,000 per year in data-collection costs.
• Successful AVL and CAD implementations can reduce fleet size by 2-5%.
  • Baltimore's Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) reduced its fleet size to meet the same level of service, resulting in savings of $2-$3 million per year.
  • Kansas City Area Transportation Authority (KCATA) saved $1.6 million with its fleet reductions resulting from AVL-CAD implementation.

AVL can help transit agencies to reroute buses around heavily congested corridors.

Other Possible Benefits

• Decreased emergency-response time.
• Reduced street-supervision labor.

Price

AVL project costs for deployment by fixed route bus agencies has ranged from $25,000 to $15 million, with a median project cost of $1 million. The cost per vehicle will likewise vary greatly, primarily dependent upon the planned functionality of the AVL system and the integration with other existing or new technologies. A very basic web-based location monitoring system cost as little as $250 per vehicle, while one bus transit agency reported its AVL-GPS system that was integrated with an expanded onboard location annunciation system ran $33,000 per fixed route bus. The median AVL system implementation cost per vehicle fall between $7,000 and $8,000. In recent years, these per vehicle costs have dropped significantly.

Modifications to transit dispatch centers to accommodate the input from a new AVL technology range between $10,000 and $50,000 per center.

Operations and Maintenance

Annual O&M costs for onboard AVL equipment and AVL communication infrastructure on the transit bus routes and at the transit dispatch/operations center average 2-5% of the original capital cost.

Telecommunication service fees may be required to relay AVL data on a cellular network.

Staff Requirements

When the AVL technology is integrated with the Computer-Aided Dispatch and Scheduling (CADS) System and/or the Geographic Information System (GIS), the transit center dispatchers will need from training on how to utilize the new or expanded systems. This dispatcher training can range from two days to two weeks.

Transit bus operators can receive two to four hours of training on the use of the AVL system, which will probably include using a Mobile Data Terminal (MDT). A data analyst may need to be hired to manipulate the AVL data into useful information for the fixed route bus agency. On average, a fully-loaded transit data analyst would cost $75,000 per year.