Benchmarking efficiency of public passenger transport in larger cities

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate public transportation efficiency in larger cities. Global agreements to decrease environmental emissions in the future (CO 2 ), world‐wide decreasing reserves of oil, and growing population in larger cities is the main motivation to develop efficiency benchmarking measurement models for public transportation systems, and gives reason for this research work. Also, from the point of view of the city, data envelopment analysis (DEA) based efficiency measurement has not been researched earlier, which is another motivation for this study from the method development perspective. Design/methodology/approach – Four different DEA‐based efficiency benchmarking models are used to evaluate public transportation efficiency in larger cities. Data are from year 2001, and amount of analyzed cities in smaller DEA model is 52 and in larger 43. This gives statistical significance and efficiency measurement confidence over the results. Findings – Medium‐sized, old and central European cities such as Bern, Munich, Prague and Zürich show frontier performance in all four models. Mega‐cities fail to reach frontier and/or good performance in small “services used” DEA model. However, some other medium‐sized cities show contrarian behaviour for “space used” DEA model. Lowest performance is more divergent in the analyses, but is found from Spanish cities, Athens, Middle East and North America. The author also found support from regression analysis that higher DEA efficiency results in lower share of private car use in large cities. Research limitations/implications – This research work uses only year 2001 data, and should be repeated in the future as public transportation data18base is being updated. The research is also limited on the use of DEA method, and other efficiency measurement methods should be used to verify the results further. Originality/value – According to the author's knowledge, this research work is seminal from the city‐level DEA efficiency benchmarking studies concerning public passenger transportation systems. Earlier research works have concerned actors (e.g. bus companies or rail operators), but the overall picture from the city level has not been researched before.