PERFORMANCE INDICATORS FOR URBAN PUBLIC TRANSPORT SYSTEMS WITH A FOCUS ON TRANSPORT POLICY EFFECTIVENESS ISSUES

The present paper reviews the methodologies that have been proposed to assess the performances of urban public transport systems, in order to identify possible research gaps. An evaluation framework is proposed to adequately address the specificities of public transport as a field of intervention of public powers, that make it different from other subsidized sectors such as health care or education. According to such framework, it is found that efficiency issues are the most studied ones, dealing with various aspects of service production with a managerial perspective, whereas customer-related quality issues have come into play in more recent years. However, the paper argues that the point of view of policy makers does not necessarily coincide with any of these two. Related transport policy effectiveness issues have been less consistently studied and probably need to be pushed up in the research agenda. The paper ends by proposing a preliminary set of new transport effectiveness indicators to properly evaluate the contribution of transit to improve a transport system on three of the aspects that are usually at the core of any policy action, namely accessibility improvement, modal diversion and environmental impacts.