An Evaluation of Virtual Representations of Transit Agencies: Are Internet Sites of Transit Agencies Functions of Their Physical Attributes?
Creators: name: Yi, Chang
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2003

description: The purpose of this study is to identify the association between virtual representations and physical attributes of transit agencies. For this study, data including information about Internet sites and physical attributes of transit agencies were obtained from the National Transit Database (NTD) for the year 2000. Then, transit agencies were sampled from the data using a stratified sampling technique from which inferences were drawn for large, medium, and small agencies. Based on theoretical and practical considerations regarding the provision of information, this study develops a rating instrument for evaluating Internet sites of transit agencies. Then, the association between the results of the evaluation and physical characteristics of transit agencies is investigated. The evaluation results suggest that transit agency size, measured in terms of ridership, plays a key role in determining how information is disseminated to the user and the quality of such information dissemination efforts. The results indicate that beyond a certain agency size there appear to be diseconomies of scale in the quality of transit information provided via the Internet. In particular, medium-sized agencies' Internet sites received the highest scores in the quality of map, schedule, and trip planner; as the size of transit agency increases, the quality of information also increases. However, after a certain agency size, the degree of complexity of transit system may be too high, thus the information may not be easily presented through Internet sites. Therefore, the overall quality of the information in large agencies is rated lower than medium agencies. While diseconomies of scale are detected in the quality of other important transit information such as map and schedule, large agencies received the highest scores in the design aspects of Internet site: the prior knowledge requirement and readability. This means that large agencies have made endeavors to make their sites more usable and processable to reduce users' cognitive costs. This may be because it is critical for large agencies to provide a high quality design in order to sort out the large amount of information sought by the user, while presenting the information itself may be difficult. Another finding indicates that large agencies provide information search functions to reduce cognitive costs of users; large agencies are more likely to provide trip planners and search functions than medium and small agencies. This is interpreted that since Internet sites of large agencies contain a large amount of information, it may be difficult for users to locate particular information they want; thus, those agencies attempt to assist users finding information they need by providing advanced information searching tools. On the other hand, medium and small agencies help transit users to find information by offering person-to-person assistance or links to other sites containing relevant information. However, these strategies may be less feasible for large agencies, since those agencies are likely to maintain a large amount of information in their sites and accommodate a large number of transit riders; thus, it may be difficult for large agencies to provide one-on-one attention to users. The results of statistical models indicate that the relationship between information quality/presence and physical attributes are not biased by the presence of Internet sites of transit agencies. However, the models confirm the previous findings: diseconomies of scale in presenting information for large transit agencies. That the results are supportive of the hypothesis of diseconomies of scale is an important finding of this study. Unfortunately, the current data are not appropriate to fully test this hypothesis, but the findings are consistent with what the hypothesis indicates. Future research should apply more standard techniques to test for the presence of such potential diseconomies of scale.