This publication brings together the main contributions and summarises the results of an important conference, organised jointly by the European Conference of Ministers of Transport and the European Commission, on transport benchmarking. Benchmarking practices have already been widely used in the private sector to back up marketing strategies and efficiency policies. The originality of this conference however lay in its attempt to broaden such methods to the public sector and also to the international community. Concrete examples presented during the conference demonstrated several clear areas where benchmarking could help in the understanding and evaluation of performances in the transport sector. However, they also revealed that we are still far from achieving harmonised, international benchmarking methods. On the basis of concrete cases, the conference stressed the importance of developing effective methodologies, so that transport benchmarking may become a genuinely efficient tool at a European level. (A)
Abstract