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A third of a century ago, management guru Peter Drucker called logistics the last great unexplored continent of business. This is no longer true. While transportation is the largest component of logistics, ordering costs, carrying costs, warehousing costs, and administrative costs are nontrivial. Corporations and academics now have departments to handle the logistics functions. Transportation has been subsumed, in many cases, by these broader departments. Managing the supply chain—from raw material assembly, to work in progress, to the physical distribution of the final product or service—is the essence of business logistics. The field has its quantitative side, with many models that minimize costs and maximize profits. A growing area is the qualitative side, which emphasizes management awareness of the logistics chain.

this paper presents two time series regression models, one in linear form and the other in logarithmic form, to estimate the monthly ridership of a single urban rail rapid transit line. The model was calibrated for a time period of about six and a half years (from 1978-1984) based on ridership data provided by a transit authority, gasoline prices provided by a state energy department, and other data.The major findings from these models are: (1) seasonal variations of ridership are -6.26°7o, or -6.20°7o for the summer period, and 4.77°70, or 4.62°7o for the October period; (2) ridership loss due to a station closure is 2.46°7o or 2.41%; and (3) elasticities of monthly ridership are -0.233 or -0.245 with respect to real fare, 0.113 or 0.112 with respect to real gasoline price, and 0.167 or 0.185 with respect to real bridge tolls for the competing automobile trips. Such route specific application results of this inexpensive approach provide significant implications for policymaking of individual programs in pricing, train operation, budgeting, system changes, etc., as they are in the case reported herein and would be in many other cities.

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