Best practices for benchmarking public transport

Performance measurement is a valuable management tool that most organisations conduct to one degree or another. To be useful to an organisation, performance measures need to be compared to something else, such as an internal performance target, ones own past performance or, ideally, the performance of comparable peers. Recent research conducted by the U.S. Transit Cooperative Research Program has developed a guidebook for applying performance measurement and peer comparison in the U.S. public transport industry as part of a comprehensive benchmarking process - a process of systematically seeking out best practices to emulate. In this process, performance measurement is not the end result, but is rather an initial tool used to generate questions that lead to identifying best practices in an area of interest. This paper summarises key findings from this research and discusses their applicability in an Australian context. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E219560.