Public transport facilitates urban and regional mobility and is considered a key ingredient in achieving both sustainable transport and community prosperity.
It also provides affordable mobility to a large number of people, facilitating not only access to most primary services, such as education and employment, but also more opportunities to actively participate in the community. Yet public transport must also meet expectations for being cleaner, and more fuel and carbon efficient1, as well as providing a quality and integrated service for current and future users. This requires continued investment in and implementation of innovation.
Although there are barriers to innovation, public transport operators, authorities and related industry sectors drive innovation and technology within their domain and will need to continue to do so to improve operational efficiency and reflect passengers’ service quality expectations. This is both an opportunity and a challenge for the sector.
The 2010 International Transport Forum (ITF) theme: Transport and Innovation: Unleashing the Potential presents an opportunity to acknowledge public transport related innovations in operations and policy. The ITF, in partnership with the UITP, is offering to award a prize for “Outstanding Innovation in Public Transport”.
Increasingly, the solutions to today’s broader transport and economic challenges will depend on innovation including new technologies, techniques, policies, and measures to implement policy. This applies equally to public transport, where innovation will help the public transport sector to continue to support trade and exchange through the mobility of people, prosperity and social inclusion, in a way that is sustainable.
New and interesting technologies as applied by public transport operators and organising authorities may include, for example, Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) that integrate tickets, payment, timetabling, etc. New techniques may include new service models, and better integration of transport modes. Examples of innovative policies for public transport could include long-term planning with cross-jurisdictional collaboration to provide sustainable, seamless door-to-door passenger travel or a goal to shift trips onto the most efficient modes of transport.
These innovations and others are being explored and implemented by many public transport operators, authorities and industry sectors supplying the public transport sector.
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