The Urban Transport Benchmarking Initiative
Overview
Background & policy context:
The Urban Transport Benchmarking Initiative has applied the concept of benchmarking to the urban transport systems present in cities across the EU and its new Member States. In total 29 cities and regions were represented in year one of the initiative (2003-2004) and 39 in year two (2004-2005). Each participant collected data relating to 25 common indicators. In addition the participants provided data and qualitative information for a range of thematic indicators, which they had selected based upon the interests of their working group. These working groups were based around the following five themes:
- Behavioural and Social Issues in Public Transport
- City Logistics (Until February 2005)
- Cycling
- Demand Management
- Public Transport Organisation and Policy
The working group themes were chosen by the participating cities to reflect their interests in terms of urban transport issues. The participating cities were also responsible for helping to select common data indicators, which have been used to benchmark general aspects of urban transport, and thematic indicators, that have been collected by cities within each of the five themed working groups. The thematic indicators are specific to each working group and aim to answer the chosen research questions. The participants have been aided with the definition and analysis of thematic indicators by their working group's expert and rapporteur.
The Urban Transport Benchmarking Initiative is built upon the experience of the two previous Citizen's Network Benchmarking Initiatives which together ran from 1998 until 2002. There have been many other transport benchmarking projects and the aim of this initiative has been to learn from the experiences of previous transport benchmarking projects and implement their findings.
The project is now in its third year (2005-2006) and the key objective is to develop the successful aspects of the first and second years in order to attempt to deepen the understanding of the link between interesting practice and good urban transport performance.
Objectives:
The key objectives of the Urban Transport Benchmarking Initiative are:
- To select annually a group of participants representing local and regional urban transport stakeholders from 35-40 cities.
- To agree a set of common performance indicators covering urban passenger and freight transport.
- To undertake a comparative analysis across stakeholders.
- To set up a maximum of 5 thematic working groups on topics agreed by the participants.
- To organise site visits (3 per year) for the working groups through which to identify and study best practices.
- To disseminate the results.
These objectives were largely achieved and a review of the achievements of years one and two of the Urban Transport Benchmarking Initiative are presented in the final report of the project.
Methodology:
The Urban Transport Benchmarking Initiative was launched formally in November 2003 and the benchmarking activity took place until June 2005, when the results of the second year of the project were disseminated at the end of year conference.
During the second year of the initiative, the benchmarking processes of self analysis, the identification of interesting practices and the analysis of performance variations shaped the activities of the participants. As stated above, following the year two launch conference in September 2004 the participants were organised into the 5 thematic working groups (Behavioural and Social Issues in Public Transport;
City Logistics (Until February 2005); Cycling; Demand Management; Public Transport Organisation and Policy)
The original topics were refined and adapted based on feedback from participants in the project. These working groups formed the basis for the majority of the work carried out in year two of the Urban Transport Benchmarking Initiative, with each group effectively undertaking an individual benchmarking exercise. In addition the participants collected data relating to 25 common indicators, which was analysed by the project team with input from the participants at the end of the second year.
In order to organise year two of the initiative around the three benchmarking processes, each of the working groups participated in 3 site visits (with the exception of the City Logistics group which terminated in February 2005). These site visits enabled the groups to have some face to face meeting time so that the participants could discuss progress through steps one to three in the benchmarking process and plan the next phases of development. In addition the site visits offered participants the opportunity to gain first-hand experience of interesting practice in different locations across Europe. This was identified by the Citizens' Network Benchmarking Initiative as one of the most valuable aspect of the previous initiative and has also proved to be important for participants in the Urban Transport Benchmarking Initiative.
Once the working groups had advanced through the process of data collection and analysis the rapporteurs from each working group were responsible for producing an end of year report, with the help of the participants in the group. The key findings from year two of the project were disseminated at the end of year conference which took place i
Share this page