Overview
Support for public passenger transport and transport serviceability is solved on the level of state budget and regional budgets, namely by earmarking funds for coverage of public service obligation contracts, subsequently concluded with respective carriers. The contracts include obligations of regions or the state to reimburse carriers for a loss caused by virtue of providing a public service.
This service is defined as guarantee of public transportation within a specified region and in compliance with an approved schedule. Funds dedicated to support transportation serviceability in the public interest are composed of the state budget's and regional budgets' sources. Requests for transportation serviceability in the public interest are passed from municipalities to regions that decide on providing the support for public transport among separate municipalities. Thereafter agreements for providing public service are concluded with carriers in the region.
The state deals with support for public transport in the interest of the state in a similar way. No such methods are used in this field that would allow the backtracking and re-evaluation of the efficiency, directness and necessity of public passenger transport support upon priorities.
The current system rather focuses on blanket support of carriers by contribution to cover their losses, basically regardless of the amount of really transferred passengers and thus creates certain imbalances in support of competitive transport systems and carriers. The current status quo does not allow for effective monitoring of the spending of these funds or questioning of their allocation in terms of priorities in compliance with national transport policy.
The purpose of the project is to develop the foundation for a database that will gather the data necessary for optimisation and planning of the state's and public budgets' expenses on transport serviceability. This system will make it possible to retro-evaluate and monitor the effectiveness of the spending of these funds depending on real use of those services by citizens, to determine the differential shared amount of public budgets on financing relevant municipality/region's transport serviceability, namely based on transport-technical parameters of respective transport networks in the region, micro region, and on local needs and priorities in the public interest.
In this way, the conditions will be created to lower the future burden on public finances by virtue of the need to cover transport serviceability expenses, by optimising distribution of those public funds on the basis of objectively measurable criteria. Moreover, a transparent system for dealing with public funds in this field will be created.
The methodology is based on processing the demands that were entered by municipalities or regions in the formalised structure. An evaluation provided by the experts is based on the criteria tree which comprises the three levels: kind of the travel, frequency of the travel, day/time determination.
All the entered demands are utilised as a benchmark. Combinations of journeys of various natures are taken into consideration (authorities, health service, etc).
The resulting transport flow (number of passengers) is estimated on basis of final demands. On this basis, the expected subsidies are calculated.
The process of the project is divided into following parts:
- development of methodology of creating and processing requests for transport serviceability,
- development of the assessment method and decision support system during optimisation of financing passenger transport serviceability from public sources,
- creation of a related database that can initiate further creation of the system to analyse the efficiency of expenses, carriers' costs, exploitation of those services by citizens etc.
The methodology of creating and processing requests for Transport Services consists of these parts:
- methodology of acquiring and evaluating the request of the transport service,
- analysis and definition of required data structure,
- definition of the criteria for evaluating requests of transport serviceability,
- development of the evaluation method and decision support system,
- definition of necessary data structures and the way of acquiring data,
- analysis of current methods' suitability for multicriterial analyses of serviceability,
- selection of a method and reasoning.
Funding
Results
The project developed a method that would allow clients of transport services to optimise the transport network and subsequently to improve efficiency of use of public funds.
The main result is the creation of methodology of compiling integrated database of requests for funding of transport services, with the option to submit requests by authorised persons, as a data source for a decision support system. A system for submitting and editing of requests for transport serviceability will be designed in a way that editing is possible through the internet and it will employ an evaluation method developed for this reason, including the option of creating alternatives based on specified criteria.
The project's results, that will be exploited by the development and validation of software utilising data from requests for allocation of public finances, will make it possible to:
- set the priorities according to national and regional needs and thus regulate spending of public funds,
- optimise the volume of public funds, dedicated to regional and micro regional transport serviceability,
- evaluation of individual requests and spending limited public funds according to the priorities set in advance.
Technical Implications
Software solutions in variable environments:
- Manual
- Pilot validation:
- Setting basic system parameters
- Filling with test data
- Testing on chosen area.
Statistical data (general code lists, statistic data,...)
- System parameters:
- Adjustable code lists and system variables
- Criteria tree and their evaluation
- Transport network diagram
- Requests for transport serviceability:
- Request submitting from the internet
- Generation of requests for journey destinations
- Quantification:
- Cumulated requests
- Traffic flow
- Subvention.
Data structure of requests for transport serviceability
Request evaluation method
Groundwork for software solution.
Policy implications
During the course of the project, there was a shift in legislation related to refunding of provable loss that transferred the competency in the field of transport serviceability in an area into the regional sphere of authority.