Methodology for rural and small-city U.S. transit agency peer grouping

Peer comparison is a valuable management tool for identifying a transit provider’s areas of relative strength, areas with room for improvement, and high-performing peers to learn from. While the U.S. Rural National Transit Database (NTD) provides performance data about rural and small city transit providers, methods and tools have been lacking for these providers to apply NTD data to identify appropriate peers. This paper describes the development of a rural transit peer-grouping method as a counterpart to a method previously developed and implemented for urban providers, and compares this method to previous transit peer-grouping approaches. In contrast to most previous efforts, which have produced fixed and often large peer groups, this method dynamically and transparently identifies appropriate peers for individual rural and small city transit providers. The method has been implemented in freely available web-based software.