Determinants of productive efficiency in urban transit

Using data from a group of mid-sized bus transit agencies in the United States. this paper measures agency level technical efficiency with non-parametric frontier analysis (data envelopment analysis or DEA). The analysis is supplemented by a second stage regression of agency characteristics on the technical efficiency scores. The interpretations of the empirical results accord with a number of previous findings about determinants of cost efficiency in U.S. transit agencies.