Published: November 2025 | Category: Inclusive access , Research programme , Research & reports | Audience: General
The research aims to identify an approach for measuring the performance of the New Zealand public transport sector that can be used at a national, regional and local level.
In doing this, it reviews international best-practice approaches to public transport performance measurement and evaluates the effectiveness of current New Zealand practice. It then proposes a new organising logic for measures and populates it with a suite of recommended measures.
The recommended measures can be used for a range of purposes. They have been selected to be intuitively understandable by a broad audience, feasible to collect, reflect important elements of system performance, and be relevant to the New Zealand context.
The framework as a whole is intended to provide clearer insights into opportunities for improving the public transport system, and to assist sector learning about successful approaches to service delivery and achieving system outcomes.
A major focus for the research is on increasing the ‘vertical integration’ of measures – that is, enabling measures to be used consistently by different organisations, across different geographic scales and for different measurement purposes. Promoting the consistent use and definition of measures creates opportunities for more efficient data collection, analysis and reporting by the sector. The research proposes that the same measures could be used for purposes ranging from everyday monitoring of public transport operations through to assessing the contribution that public transport makes to strategic policy objectives.
The research also identifies methods by which a new measurement framework could be implemented, along with likely challenges, and makes recommendations for improving performance measurement practices.
Keywords:
public transport; indicators; measures; performance measurement
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