Developing a Decision Support System for Evaluating an Investment in Fare Collection Systems in Transit

This article presents the initial development of a decision support system (DSS) to assess cost impacts of upgrading or replacing a transit ticketing and fare collection (TFC) system. Assessment of these costs, typically, requires extensive calculations and involves estimation of unknown parameters such as future ridership growth rate, equipment utilization rate, and interest rate on debt financing. This DDSD is developed with wo categories of policy- and decision-makers in mind - transit agency managers and transit industry researchers.