A Major Step in Latin America Towards High Quality Public Transportation for All
The First SIBRT Service Quality and User Satisfaction Workshop, organized by SIBRT with the support of Transantiago, our ALC-BRT Centre of Excellence, and the EMBARQ Network, brought together more than 40 participants from 12 cities and six Latin-American countries to discuss how to offer high quality public transportation services and achieve user satisfaction. The event took place from July 23-27 in Santiago, Chile during the Conference on Advanced Systems for Public Transport, CASPT12.
The exchange of experiences is part of the growing and systematic benchmarking work underway by SIBRT, which was inspired by the precursory experiences of the Railway Technology Strategy Centre – RTSC of the Imperial College of London. This benchmarking work is being done in cooperation with our Centre of Excellence, which contributes scientific expertise to SIBRT. This cooperation was critical to ensure that the SIBRT Workshop in Santiago achieved world class quality.
“We need to recognize the contributions of visionary Professor Juan Carlos Muñoz, who leads the Center of Excellence, and the amazing work of his team of researcher from PUC Chile, and recognize the methodological guidance provided by Professor Luis Antonio Lindau, the President of EMBARQ Brazil, for opening a fruitful space for exchange and cooperation between the different actors that are responsible for providing quality public transportation services” asserted Luis Gutiérrez, Strategic Director for Latin America for the EMBARQ Network and General Secretary of SIBRT.
The discussions took place through SIBRT agency presentations and group dynamics covering each one of the three critical themes: managing user opinions, performance indicators and contractual mechanisms. The workshop permitted the agencies’ technical staff to learn about the point of view of the private operators from Colombia and Mexico and also from some transit suppliers, which added to the analysis that was being done in the small groups.
The work was led by André Jacobsen, SIBRT Benchmarking Expert, with the help of four professional facilitators that recorded all the ideas and suggestions expressed by the participants, so as to later synthesize all of the information and discussions from the workshop.
The closing session of CASPT12 served as another fruitful milestone for our work in Santiago. Public transportation supplies of planning, information, and management technology and software presented on their products to an audience of transit managers, operators, experts and consultants which led to a valuable and an acute discussion on the future of the industry and the services needed in the transit sector. SIBRT presented its vision on the modernization challenges facing public transportation providers in Latin America y the need to work together through strategic alliances. In this way, CASPT12 became a privileged setting for dialogue and cooperation between different transit sectors that had not come together in this format before. “We are very pleased with the work that occurred in this final meeting…Suppliers, managers, and operators were, for the first time, the protagonists of a process of exchanging experiences and concepts that were very constructive and creative, that we hope to see repeated in the future…Our Center will be ready to repeat this process as many times as is needed…”, said Juan Carlos Muñoz.
The knowledge gathered in the First SIBRT Service Quality and User Satisfaction Workshop will serve as the basis for the realization of a common strategic agenda. SIBRT, the Center of Excellence, and the EMBARQ Network have agreed to develop studies and guides of best practices that support all those involved in public transportation systems in Latin American cities so that they will have the opportunity to improve their capacity and implement services with the highest quality standards.
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