  An important aspect of public bus transit is its reliability of being
on-time, which has a major impact on bus ridership. Currently, there is no
unified national standard to measure bus on-time performance in the United
States. This paper proposes a novel approach to improve the on-time performance
(OTP) of buses at transit agencies throughout the country, based on factors
unique to each agency. In this study, information on 18 public transit agencies
data were obtained from the National Transit Database and were verified by the
authors after contacting the respective agencies. A correlation analysis was
conducted to evaluate the influence of different factors on bus OTP. The
results show that a higher congestion ranking of the cities i.e. lesser traffic
has a positive correlation with OTP while a lower number of passengers per hour
has a negative correlation with OTP, both at a 95% confidence interval. Total
miles per active vehicle and average speed of the bus were found to have a
positive correlation with OTP at a 90% confidence interval. This potentially
suggests that, if the average speed of the bus is higher i.e. if the bus
operates at its scheduled speed, total miles per active vehicle will increase,
which will in turn lead to a better on-time performance. A flow diagram
interpreting the results of the correlation analysis was shown, where the main
bus service process was considered and the predecessors and successors which
could potentially affect the final OTP, were determined.
