Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
FOREWORD By Staff Transportation Research Board PREFACE Transit administrators, engineers, and researchers often face problems for which in- formation already exists, either in documented form or as undocumented experience and practice. This information may be fragmented, scattered, and unevaluated. As a conse- quence, full knowledge of what has been learned about a problem may not be brought to bear on its solution. Costly research findings may go unused, valuable experience may be overlooked, and due consideration may not be given to recommended practices for solv- ing or alleviating the problem. There is information on nearly every subject of concern to the transit industry. Much of it derives from research or from the work of practitioners faced with problems in their day-to-day work. To provide a systematic means for assembling and evaluating such use- ful information and to make it available to the entire transit community, the Transit Co- operative Research Program Oversight and Project Selection (TOPS) Committee author- ized the Transportation Research Board to undertake a continuing study. This study, TCRP Project J-7, âSynthesis of Information Related to Transit Problems,â searches out and synthesizes useful knowledge from all available sources and prepares concise, docu- mented reports on specific topics. Reports from this endeavor constitute a TCRP report series, Synthesis of Transit Practice. The synthesis series reports on current knowledge and practice, in a compact format, without the detailed directions usually found in handbooks or design manuals. Each re- port in the series provides a compendium of the best knowledge available on those meas- ures found to be the most successful in resolving specific problems. This synthesis will be of interest to transit practitioners and researchers, including technical staff and transit managers, as well as to vendors of Geographic Information System (GIS) solutions. This report illustrates the value of GIS to transit agencies in ser- vice provision and in potential cost savings. The synthesis summarizes the experiences of a variety of transit agencies, with information provided from small- and medium-sized transit operators, as well as from large transit agencies. It documents current practices, effective applications, and challenges. This report from the Transportation Research Board includes a broad-based literature review supplemented by survey responses from more than 100 transit agencies. The re- port covers the full range of transit services including planning, operations, management, information technology, and customer service. Included are case studies from five large transit operators that demonstrate a number of innovative uses of GIS, as well as illustrate how GIS is becoming a part of mainstream information technology and a core technol- ogy in transit information services. A panel of experts in the subject area guided the work of organizing and evaluating the collected data and reviewed the final synthesis report. A consultant was engaged to collect and synthesize the information and to write the report. Both the consultant and the members of the oversight panel are acknowledged on the title page. This synthesis is an immediately useful document that records the practices that were acceptable within the limitations of the knowledge available at the time of its preparation. As progress in re- search and practice continues, new knowledge will be added to that now at hand.