The development of a benchmarking tool for monitoring progress towards sustainable transportation in New Zealand

Creating and maintaining a safe and sustainable transport system is a common challenge for road authorities around the world. The New Zealand government has taken this challenge one step further by incorporating it into country’s legislation. As a consequence all road land transport authorities are committed to implementing initiatives to respond to both the challenge and the legislation. A benchmarking process for the transport sector is one of these initiatives on a national level. Benchmarking is a well known and utilised technology for the measuring of performance for infrastructure, for example within the water provision sector in England. This paper presents the development of a national benchmarking process for the transport sector of New Zealand. This development is part of a strategy to encourage road land transport authorities to improve the performance of transport in achieving sustainability and environmental targets. The development involved a literature review, proof of concept and the full implementation stage. A total of nine key performance indicators were developed to indicate the status of transport sector performance. The project and its outcomes are considered to be of benefit to road land transport authorities across the world who wish to develop a benchmark process of their own.

Research Highlights
► In establishing a benchmarking process for monitoring transport, one of the most surprising results of the pilot study was to see how quickly some meaningful comparisons became possible.
► An initial stumbling block was using data from different sources that did not necessarily represent the same area boundaries. For example, certain data items such as travel distance and purpose are normally reported for city councils, while typical census data is reported on a wider regional basis.
► Reliable data is crucial to the benchmarking process as the information supports the decision-making process. A data verification process is recommended as an integral part of the benchmarking process.