Performance Analysis of Fixed Route Shared Taxi Services (Jitney) - Case Study of Tehran, Iran

The fixed route shared taxi, known as Jitney, is one of the common modes in paratransit services and covers a significant proportion of daily trips in some developing countries, including Iran. Such system, despite its disadvantages to transportation networks, has always been the most feasible solution to overcome the shortcoming in public transit supply. As a result, it has formed users’ travel habits over the decades. Therefore, it is not possible to remove or replace Jitney lines with standard services suddenly but gradually. Unfortunately, there is a distinct lack of a comprehensive method to analyze and evaluate Jitney lines neither in the literature nor in practice. In this paper, first, to fill the gap in the literature, we develop a coherent framework to analyze the performance of fixed route shared taxi lines. This framework includes several indices that make it possible to rank and classify Jitney lines from different aspects. Second, to examine the applicability of the proposed framework, we apply it to the network of taxi lines in the metropolis of Tehran. The results prove that the framework is not only applicable in measuring the system performance, but it also provides decision-makers with decision criteria to choose improvement plans or alternatives.