This study considers benchmarking of transport systems and their performance, as a policy-making tool.There are now a myriad of benchmarking exercises being undertaken.Usually each exercise is individually tailored for a specific purpose and they require siginificant resources to complete.As a result, they are often incomparable ad their findings misunderstood or misrepresented.Likewaise, the practical and data difficulties involved in their completion are commonly understated.To add to this a political dimension.Benchmarking requires transparent data regarding the provision and performance of transport services.It threatens to expose authorities and policymakers to criticism and/or congratulation.An appreciation of the wider policy development process and broad objectives "to imrove transport services", is a pre-requisite for trust and then for participation of many authorities.It is argued in this paper that if these issues are recognised at the outset (in the scoping of the exercise), if the benchmarking indicators are fully developed with readily available data and, if the cities are broadly comparable, then benchmarking can be a useful tool in the policy formulation process.This is likely to be in a minority of cases as most experience to date indicates that it is extremely difficult to draw meaningful local conclusions purely from benchmarking one city with others.It needs tobe supported by good quality data and established policy development processes.For the covering entry of this conference please see ITRD E132365.
Abstract