Rethinking public transport contracts: towards value-based KPis for reliable bus services
Project name: Rethinking public transport contracts: towards value-based KPis for reliable bus services
Project leader:
Zhenliang Ma
, Transport planing
Participants KTH: Haoye Chen
Participating universities: Skolkansli ABE
Project period: 2025-06-15 - 2026-06-14
Funding: K2 centrum - The Swedish Knowledge Centre for Collective Mobility
The primary purpose of this project is to critically evaluate and empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of regularity-based KPIs compared to traditional punctuality-based KPIs in public transport (PT) service contracts. By leveraging comprehensive multisource operational data from Region Stockholm (SL), the project specifically aims to:
- Diagnose the current effectiveness of punctuality-based KPIs by assessing their correlation with actual passenger experiences, operational efficiency, and capacity utilization.
- Propose evidence-based recommendations for transitioning toward regularity-based KPIs to achieve better alignment with user experiences and operational goals.
The project will directly enhance K2’s mission to develop and disseminate new and practically relevant knowledge, stimulating future policy development, operational improvements, and potential pilot implementations in Region Stockholm and beyond.
Specifically, this project is highly relevant to K2’s research orientations as it directly addresses the Improve perspective by identifying specific shortcomings in current public transport service contracts and proposing concrete, data-driven improvements. It also aligns with K2’s perspective on Renew and Deepen, introducing innovative measurement techniques and data-analytic approaches to rethink traditional service management models. It challenges existing operational paradigms and facilitates evidence-driven renewal in contract design and management practices.
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