TBEST

TBEST stands for The Transit Boardings Estimation and Simulation Tool. TBEST has been interfaced with and derives its GIS functionality from ESRI’s ArcGIS suite of products.  

Over the past few years, the FDOT Public Transit Office has been at the forefront in the development of state-of-the-art transit analysis tools.  In the specific area of transit ridership estimation and forecasting, the FDOT Public Transit Office funded the development of the Integrated Transit Demand and Supply Model (ITSUP) and the Regional Transit Feasibility Analysis and Simulation Tool (RTFAST).  Both of these tools were well received by the user community for their ability to estimate ridership at the individual stop-level, user-friendly graphical interface, GIS functionality, and analytical rigor.  The user community provided a wealth of feedback and helped identify a number of improvements that could be made to these tools.  TBEST represents a third and culminating effort in the development of robust stop-level models of transit ridership.  TBEST is a comprehensive transit analysis and ridership forecasting model that is capable of simulating travel demand at the individual stop-level while accounting for network connectivity, spatial and temporal accessibility, time-of-day variations, and route competition and complementarity.