Redundancy in Public Transit - Vol. IV: Structure, Competition, and Reliability in Planning and Operations

In contrast to the private sector, public services in the United States are organized monopolistically. the structure of public sector monopoly has been bolstered by the conventional wisdom in public administration, which has traditionally maintained that functional duplication is wasteful. This position has recently been challenged by a small group of political scientists and economists who suggest that a redundant organizational structure can make the execution of a given program more reliable and make the design of new programs more innovative.This study examines urban transit planning and operations, subjecting these two opposing perspectives to empirical scrutiny. It was hypothesized that, during transit planning, redundant planning would increase the intensity of search for transit alternatives, and that during operations, redundant modes would increase service reliability in the face of a variety of disturbances. These propositions were examined in three case studies: (1) a study of interorganizational, redundant, transit operations in the San Francisco Bay Area; (2) a study of modally integrated, monopolistic transit operations in Washington, D.C.; and (3) a study of interorganizational competitive transit planning in Minneapolis-St. Paul. The findings follow below.The redundant transit system composed of overlapping operators proved more reliable than either of its parts. The bus agency was plagued by two long strikes; the rapid rail district, by mechanical difficulties and labor disputes. Because the two organizations are (nearly) completely independent, failures in one agency did not impair the other's functioning.The nonredundant, monopolistic system in Washington, D.C. performed more reliably than expected, largely because of the system's conservative technical design. However, there were internal management difficulties associated with efforts at modal integration. The old and ailing bus system received insufficient managerial support and attention for