Cost Function and Economic Characteristics of Handicap Bus

• Main Authors: Ping-Chi Chen, 陳品齊
• Other Authors: 張學孔
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/xku7hd

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 土木工程學研究所 === 105 === In view of approaching the aging society, how to deal with various care needs is the serious concern in our society. Transportation issues accounted for the heavy proportion of people living. Hence, for the elderly and people with disabilities, an accessible and barrier-free transportation environment is an important goal that welfare country is working for. Taiwan''s most representative accessible transportation service is the handicap bus. For the increasing demand for handicap bus in the near future, service performance, economic features and operational characteristics of the handicap bus are worthy of research in formulating operation program and development strategy of handicap bus services. In this study, operational performance and economic characteristics of handicap bus in Taichung City are analyzed. First, this study uses statistics analysis to understand its operation status and basic information. It is shown that the average trip length is associated with the area of the service zones while the turnover rate of the handicap bus is associated with distribution of hospitals in each service zone. Then, this study develops Translog cost function to explore economic characteristics of handicap bus services in Taichung. The output of the function is passenger-kilometers while the input variables consist of oil cost, maintenance cost and labor cost. The data used in analysis is from the Taichung City Government with operation data on 2015 to 2016. It is found that the Taichung handicap bus has characteristics of scale economies in both service zone level and overall city area. The oil cost and maintenance cost’s elasticity is close to 0 and there exists the attribute of stickiness. Besides, after the independent variable test, it is found that the turnover rate and the passenger occupancy rate are highly correlated. This positive correlation implied that the increase in the turnover rate may reduce un-used mileages and then increase the occupancy rate. It is therefore suggested that the handicap bus service should have strategy of enhancing the turnover rate and it can help of reducing the operation cost and increase overall operation performance and service quality.