The Federal Transit Administration has approved six sampling plans that transit agencies can use to estimate the consumption of fixed-route bus services for reporting to the National Transit Database. These sampling plans follow a simple framework and are assumed to be universally applicable. Some background information is presented, and then these sampling plans (including the related statistical theory, the development of the sampling plans based on this theory, and the estimation procedure) are reviewed. More important, a set of allowable variations in passenger miles is defined for each sampling plan, and it is demonstrated that these sampling plans are not universally applicable. Improved sampling options are proposed within the simple framework of the original sampling plans.
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