How Does Operational Environment Influence Public Transport Effectiveness? Evidence from European Urban Bus Operators

Public transport systems’ effectiveness is a well-recognized pillar of their sustainability. In this study, we employed order-m efficiency estimators to investigate the effectiveness of 57 bus public transport operators that provide services in both large and medium sized European cities. Their effectiveness was simulated through a tailored production model and was evaluated against critical exogenous variables, which were mostly extracted from Eurostat database. Results showed that the effectiveness of the examined operators is generally satisfactory. Our research suggests that certain exogenous factors significantly affect operators’ effectiveness and thus create either advantageous or disadvantageous operational environments for maintaining public transport sustainability. Among these factors, household size, unemployment and car ownership rates were found to be unfavorable to bus public transport operations. Contrary to them, the presence of university students and metro systems in cities create a favorable operational environment for bus public transport effectiveness. These findings assist in the identification of sustainable development policies that would both contribute to public transport sustainability and to the fulfillment of wider community goals. Our findings also rationalize benchmarking exercises in the public transport industry, since they enable fair performance comparisons between systems that seek to incorporate successful management practices to improve their sustainability.