Meet the Author

Eric Bruun is a consulting engineer and researcher for the transit industry and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked for the National Transit Institute at Rutgers University and was a columnist for Urban Transport International. He earned a doctorate in systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

APA’s Planners Press published his book, Better Public Transit Systems: Analyzing Investments and Performance in January.

Why did you decide to write Better Public Transit Systems ?

There are lots of books that explain investment analysis methods generically, but not applied to transit specifically. Using a generic approach, there are non-monetary goals for projects that most likely would be overlooked and key relationships that wouldn't be captured in the analysis.

Furthermore, there are public debates over major projects where highly oversimplified arguments are made and unwarranted conclusions are drawn. So I wanted to try to inform this debate by both calling for inclusion of a wider array of costs and benefits and showing how these could be included.

How do you think people will use the book?

I am hoping that people who are most familiar with one perspective based on their particular expertise or interests will read chapters that cause them to widen their perspectives to include other aspects.

I also hope that people will suggest to their elected officials and public-sector planning bodies that some of the approaches presented in this book, and by other individuals, be incorporated into official decision-making processes.

What do you think most planners should know—but don't—about transit?

How to counter the oft-repeated argument that, since each ride is subsidized so much, an investment in a capital-intensive transit project will be both unfair to the non-users and poor use of public funds. Numbers such as $20 to $30 per ride get thrown around and it makes projects sound really negative. While investments can't automatically be defended, neither can one generalize based on a single cost indicator such as total amortized cost per passenger. Planners need to know both how to critique the appropriateness of cost indicators and to counter with some benefit indicators.

How can planners incorporate unquantifiable social costs and benefits and measures of sustainability into their analysis of public transit systems?

There are quite a few ways and people are already doing it today to some extent. But the difficulty is that official processes lag behind the times. One basic reform that would increase incorporation of unquantifiable aspects would be to require more use of outreach methods to help weight the relative importance of the numerous project goals. In this way the strictly monetary considerations become less dominant.

Another basic reform is one that would have profound implications for all public investment policy. If we are to take sustainable development seriously then we must fully include the costs and benefits to future generations. This could be done in large part by not discounting the monetized estimates of these costs and benefits in the same way we do actual project cash expenditures.

Learn more about Better Public Transit Systems