Benchmarking is one of the management tools that have recently been introduced in the transport sector. It is rapidly being applied to a wide range of transport operations, services and policies. This paper is a contribution to the discussion of the role of benchmarking in the future efforts to support Sustainable European Transport Policies. The key message is that transport benchmarking has not yet been developed to cope with the challenges of this task. Rather than backing down completely, the paper suggests some critical conditions for applying and adopting benchmarking for this purpose. One way forward is to ensure a higher level of environmental integration in transport policy benchmarking. To this effect the paper will discuss the possible role of the so-called Transport and Environment Reporting Mechanism developed by the European Environment Agency. The paper provides an independent contribution to the discussions within the EU-sponsored BEST Thematic Network (Benchmarking European Sustainable Transport) which ran from 2000 to2003. (A)
Abstract