Board of customers

Establish a board of customers and use their advice in planning and evaluation of performance of the system and complaints.

Explanation:

A High Quality Public Transport system is one that fulfils as far as possible the (potential) passengers’ needs and expectations. An advisory board of customers or a customer panel can be of great assistance in creating and maintaining HQPT. Given the local knowledge and contacts in the community, they can both provide valuable input from the (potential) user’s perspective and at the same time communicate and promote the bus transport system to the (potential) user groups they represent.

The board can be asked to give advice and comment on all aspects of the public transport system: planning, performance of the system and evaluation of complaints and suggestions. It depends on the local circumstances which organisations or individuals should be involved.

Possible members of a board of customers can be seen in the following organisations / groups:

• Public Transport Passengers Organisations: In many EU countries there are clubs of public transport users. On the European level they are represented by the European Passengers Federation (EPF). Very often the national public transport passenger organisations have regional / local branches. Given their expertise in the field of public transport and their knowledge of the passenger needs they are helpful partners.
• Chambers of commerce,
• Trade unions,
• Organisations of elderly and / or handicapped persons,
• Major employers or schools,
• Organisations of car owners, like ADAC (Germany) or ANWB (The Netherlands)
• Non-organised regular users: individual passengers (e.g. season ticket holders) will provide information from their daily experience with the public transport system.

It depends on city size and the local circumstances who is invited to take part in a board of customers and which strategy to select representatives is applied. In bigger cities it can be advisable to go for non-organised individual members only to gather a representative profile of everyday users and to tone down pressure groups. The participants can be recruited by public announcement in newspapers or in vehicles. Based on their application, a segmentation based on different criteria (sex, city district, age, occupation) is made to get a representative profile of users.

Further approaches to maintain public relations with users as well as special interest organisations can be:

• Regular meetings between the management and organisations with special interest in urban bus services (organisations as given above, where applicable: representative of political parties),
• Introduction of a user group of one line or corridor,
• Regular workshops between management and citizens in city districts.

Critical issues:

Good practice examples:

References and background reading:

Related guidelines: