Service Level Benchmarking in Urban Transport

The Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India announced ‘Service Level Benchmarks for Urban Transport’ in 2012 for measuring and monitoring urban transport performance in cities. Before this, there was no standard framework for performance monitoring of urban transport. CoE-UT has been involved in an action research project to operationalise these benchmarks. This exercise is being carried out in six case study cities of India – Ahmedabad, Bhubaneswar, Hubbali-Dharwad, Kohima, Mysore, and Surat. The benchmarking exercise includes preparing detailed operational guidelines, defining study areas, standardization of data collection methods, and development of analysis frameworks. These benchmarks offer a comprehensive set of indicators for cities to assess where they stand in comparison to other cities and also analyse their own progress in transport performance over time. The study has been structured in two phases:

Phase I: Developed methodology for undertaking SLB exercise (data collection, analysis, assess indicator selection (validity and addition/deletion, if any) and presented final SLBs for selected cities (Initiated in January 2012, completed in September 2013).

Phase II: Conducted in two rounds, round one monitoring after 2 years (initiated in 2015 and completed in August 2016) and round two monitoring (initiated in March 2019 and completed in January 2020).

Performance Assessment of Bus-Based Public Transport System

Considering that an effective public transportation system is essential to develop liveable cities, the Secretary of MoHUA advised formulating a separate rating system for public transport by assigning weights for the different indicators. In line with this, a framework for assessing the performance of the public transport system has been developed, considering the perspectives of the customers, operators, and society. It consists of five dimensions and twenty-five indicators. It enables the assessment of city public transport performance at aggregate and disaggregate levels over the years.

1. At an aggregate level, a ‘Public Transport Performance Index (PTPIc)’ is presented as a weighted composite score ranging from ‘zero’ to a hundred’. The higher the value of PTPI, the better the performance of the city as a whole.

2. The performance of the city public transport system is measured using the following five dimensions: Service Availability, Service Delivery, Financial Sustainability, Service Effectiveness, and Service Accessibility, which is presented as a spider diagram.

3. The performance of the city's public transport system concerning each of the indicators of the five dimensions is presented as a bar graph.

The framework can also be utilised for a comparative assessment of public transport systems across cities. This exercise is being carried out in three case study cities of India – Ahmedabad, Surat, and Bhubaneswar.