The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) embarked on a research program entitled “Efficient Deployment of Advanced Public Transportation Systems” (EDAPTS) in the late 1990’s. The Bronco Express EDAPTS Stage 5 Deployment Demonstrationproject at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona) is an integral part of this program. Its objective is to go through the procurement and deployment process of a low cost Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) solution to determine if the EDAPTS concepts are optimized for small transit agencies and if they can be successfully transitioned to the commercial marketplace.

This report documents the installation, verification, and validation steps associated with the Bronco Express EDAPTS Demonstration project. It identifies and summarizes procedures that are effective in installing and testing a lower-cost ITS system and provides a practical methodology for verifying and validating small transit ITS systems. It also documents outcomes of the installed system in compliance with the user needs and the performance specifications as requested in the Bronco Express EDAPTS RFP.

The Efficient Deployment of Advanced Public Transportation Systems (EDAPTS) demonstration at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona assessed the viability of using the EDAPTS procurement, installation, verification, and validation processes in a small transit environment to reduce the cost of ownership for technology solutions. Modified Systems Engineering processes were used to deploy an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) solution on the Cal Poly Pomona Bronco Express campus bus system. This report provides a summary of methodologies used, outcomes, findings, recommendations and lessons learned stemming from the demonstration.

The report explains the use of a modified version of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Systems Engineering “V-model” that helped the research team and stakeholders coalesce with a common understanding of expectations of what the procured system needed to do. The EDAPTS procurement process used by Bronco Express demonstrated a practical procurement and bidding methodology useful to small and medium transit agencies when acquiring ITS solutions. It also summarizes procedures that are effective for installing and testing lower-cost ITS systems and provides a practical methodology for verifying and validating them. Lastly, it compares the results with the original user needs and the performance specifications requested in the Bronco Express EDAPTS RFP.

This study addresses the benefits and costs of Advanced Public Transportation Systems (APTS) applications in small and medium sized transit agencies using the research test implementation of a small transit oriented Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) on San Luis Obispo Transit as a case study. The Smart Transit System at San Luis Obispo is in a pre-commercialized state and implements the Efficient Development of Advanced Public Transportation Systems (EDAPTS) framework concept (Gerfen, 2001). The system has many potential benefits that will be identified and evaluated from a cost of service standpoint. The supporting hypothesis of this research is that small transit properties will be encouraged to deploy the EDAPTS ITS framework concept if the San Luis Obispo Smart Transit System can be shown to have a viable benefit-cost ratio.

In order to deploy ITS applications, transit properties typically look for benefits and costs information about the services they are considering as well as documented lessons learned from the experiences of others. To be most effective, these inputs should be supplemented with information that describes the context from which the data were derived.

Since the implementation of this EDAPTS Smart Transit System in 2001, only limited data analysis has been undertaken to evaluate the benefits of the system to riders, operators and the Cal Poly SLO community. A complete benefit-cost analysis is needed to provide small or medium sized transit properties with the economic justification of the EDAPTS framework deployment.

This paper documents the literature review undertaken to summarize past work on evaluation of similar APTS applications and to identify and assess the analytic methods and tools available for the complete benefit-cost evaluation of SLO Transit Smart Transit System.