Overview
This report identifies the institutional and economic reasons that have impeded the adoption of TCIP standards into the public transit industry. Overall, there is a fundamental tradeoff to be made in the adoption of technology standards such as TCIP, a tradeoff between short-term benefits which accrue to individual actors, and long-term benefits which accrue to the industry at large. Furthermore, vendors are reluctant to develop TCIP-based products without a customer base on which they can rely for future sales, and transit agencies are reluctant to issue RFPs for TCIP-compliant systems if there are no TCIP-compliant products already on the market. The nature of the transit industry compounds this problem in that the market for transit business systems is not a technology-driven market, and TCIP creates important economic disincentives for vendors, consultants, and transit agencies who may be early adopters of the TCIP standards. Additional considerations inhibit the adoption of TCIP, such as inconsistent support from various Federal Transit Administration (FTA) departments, rapidly changing information technologies, and the rapid rise of the open transit data movement, through which other transit data standards may have stolen some of inertia and interest away from TCIP. For these reasons, it appears unlikely that TCIP will be widely adopted in the short term by the transit industry. The most significant reasons are economic rather than technical, however, which suggests that TCIP may still have a role to play in enabling interoperability among and between transit business systems. Assuming that TCIP is still technically feasible, and that transit industry stakeholders wish to continue to promote its adoption, this report offers two general recommendations that address some of the barriers to adoption articulated herein: (1) a large-scale demonstration of TCIP, and (2) enhanced documentation and knowledge transfer of TCIP benefits, challenges, and interface engineering resources