Benchmarking and Sustainable Transport Policy: Some lessons from the BEST network

Order to learn from the best. In 2000 the European Commission initiated research to explore benchmarking as a tool to promote policies for ‘sustainable transport’. This paper reports findings and recommendations on how to address this challenge. The findings suggest that benchmarking is a valuable tool that may indeed help to move forward the transport policy agenda. However, there are major conditions and limitations. First of all it is not always so straightforward to delimit, measure and compare transport services in order to establish a clear benchmark. Secondly ‘sustainable transport’ evokes a broad range of concerns that are hard to address fully at the level of specific practices. Thirdly policies are not directly comparable across space and context. For these reasons attempting to benchmark ‘sustainable transport policies’ against one another would be a highly complex task, which is generally not advised. Several other ways in which benchmarking and policy can support one another are identified in the analysis. This leads to a range of recommended initiatives to exploit the benefits of benchmarking in transport while avoiding some of the lurking pitfalls and dead ends