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Public authorities and transport operators across Europe are under pressure to
provide more services with less money. At the same time, authorities and operators
are expected to play a full part in supporting wider objectives such as
environmental improvement and economic and social development.
By benchmarking (i.e. comparing) the performance of their own municipalities or
regions with the performance of other municipalities or regions with good
standards, they can find out in what areas they perform well and where they
perform badly.
In order to promote good local and regional transport the European Commission
has launched a wide scale project aimed at involving cities and regions from
throughout the whole of Europe to compare and assess the performance of their
local transport systems.
The Citizens’ Network Benchmarking Initiative involves a large group of local
and regional authorities, ranging from large metropolitan regions to rural
towns and districts. The initiative is open to municipalities, regions and
transport authorities from throughout the whole of Europe (EU Member states,
other European countries including Central and Eastern European countries).
The aim is to enable each of these cities and regions to assess the strengths
and weaknesses of its transport system, to compare it with those of the others
and decide what can be improved and how.
The participating cities and regions measure and compare their transport
systems' performance on the basis of common indicators. These indicators
address a number of questions: what transport services do people want, and how
well is the system meeting these requirements? What is the impact of transport
on the environment? How safe is it to travel? And so on.
Working groups examine selected topics, which they see as a priority for
delivering improvements. Each thematic working group is usually composed of
five to six local/regional authorities. The working groups define a set of
thematic indicators corresponding to the theme of the working group and conduct
site visits to cases of best practice.
The long-term aim of the initiative is to establish a self-sufficient network
of localities that will be able to carry out benchmarking exercises in areas in
which they would like to increase their knowledge by learning from others. The
underlying principle is to enable those with direct responsibility for
transport to use benchmarking as a very practical and efficient tool to improve
the quality of transport on the ground.
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