Development of outcomes based national road and rail safety performance measures

Abstract

Transport delivers many benefits to the community, business, the environment and government. Yet transport agencies tend to monitor and report on activities and outputs rather than the real outcomes which are rarely measured. Management theory and practice has developed to measure performance in order to improve organisational efficiency and effectiveness, which can therefore be applied to transport. This paper reports the foundations for transport performance measurement and safety measures prepared for the Australian National Transport Commission (NTC) which sought to develop outcomes based performance measures. The basis is an understanding of the current and developing theory and practice in performance measurement and a description of the context. A framework for performance measures, including criteria for selection, and content requirements provides the outline for the safety measures. The paper concludes with a description of the road and rail performance measures which were developed. The overview of the development of outcomes based performance measurement for road and rail safety provided in this paper summarises the information to develop practical measures for transport which can be used for policy and operations management. The information is relevant for transport policy agencies, regulators, infrastructure owners and operators, primarily in government, but also in the private sector.