[Information drawn from TCRP Report 101, "Toolkit for Rural Community Coordinated Transportation Services". Pgs. 22-24,http://www.trb.org/publications/tcrp/tcrp_rpt_101.pdf.]

The benefits of successful coordinated transportation systems often include providing greater access to funding, creating a more cost-effective use of resources, including reduced duplication and overlap in human service agency transportation services; filling service gaps in a community or geographic area; serving additional individuals within existing budgets; and providing more centralized management of existing resources.

Coordination has a wide range of potential benefits. The three major possible benefit categories are:

1. Coordinated transportation systems often have access to more funds.  They also have more sources of funds and other resources.
2. Second, higher quality and more cost-effective services can result from more centralized control of resources.
3. Third, coordinated services can offer more visible transportation services for consumers and less confusion about how to access services.

Here's how the benefits of coordination usually come about. Greater access to funds is provided by:

• Tapping a wider range of funding programs
• Accessing a greater variety of staff and facilities
• Employing more specialized and skilled staff

A more cost-effective use of resources is created through:

• Productivity increases
• Economies of scale
• Eliminating waste caused by duplicated efforts
• More centralized planning and management of resources

Greater productivities and efficiencies are used to:

• Fill service gaps in a community by offering services to additional individuals and geographic areas within existing budgets
• Provide more trips for community members, thus enhancing their quality of life
• Generate cost savings to some participating agencies in special forms of coordinated transportation service

More centralized management of existing resources results in:

• Greater visibility for transportation services:
  • to riders
  • to agencies needing trips for their clients
  • to the community
  • to funding sources
• Reduced consumer confusion about how to access services
• Clearer lines of authority
• More professional (more comfortable, reliable, and safe) transportation services

The effectiveness of the primary services offered by human service agencies (who have turned the transportation function over to a coordinated provider) is improved. 

Other interagency cooperative efforts -- working together on non-transportation issues -- can be stimulated.

On the negative side, it is often more costly, more difficult, and more time-consuming to achieve coordination than most agency representatives initially perceive.  Coordination does not necessarily free up transportation dollars for other activities.  Also, coordination agreements can unravel over time, so that constant work is necessary to ensure that all parties continue working together.