Evaluating the effectiveness of public transport operations: a critical review and some policy indicators

This paper critically analyses the methodologies proposed to assess the performance of urban public transport systems. A unified framework of evaluation drawing from this review is proposed to adequately address the specifics of public transport. This framework suggests that efficiency issues are the most studied, primarily dealing with various aspects of service production with a managerial perspective. More recently, customer-related quality issues have received greater attention in the literature. However, the point of view of policy makers does not necessarily coincide with either any of these two perspectives. Related transport policy effectiveness issues – such as variations in total emissions of pollutants or other social benefits due to improved transit – have been less consistently studied and need to be pushed up in the research agenda. The framework that we followed to map the existing literature allows also a partial correction where there was confusion in the examination of effectiveness issues, due to an overlapping of the points of view of users and decision makers. Finally, on the basis of our classification, the paper proposes a set of effectiveness indicators to properly evaluate the contribution of transit to the broader functioning of transport systems according to accessibility, modal diversion and environmental impacts.