Hugo Poelman
Scientific Technical Support Officer
European Commission, DG Regional and Urban Policy
Belgium

Biography
Hugo Poelman received training in social sciences and statistics. He joined the European Commission's services in 1992 to work on the implementation of regional rural development programmes. In 1996, he joined the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy, where he contributed to the development of geographic and statistical information for policy conception and reporting purposes. Since 2006, he manages the GIS team of that Directorate-General. Recent topics in his work are the development of territorial typologies and city definitions and the analytical use of grid-based population data and urban land use data."

Abstract
Developing Harmonised Indicators on Urban Public Transport in Europe

Within Europe there have been multiple attempts to collect data on the supply and access to public transport in cities. So far these attempts have failed to produce comparable results because they were not based on comparable geographies and did not take into account the spatial distribution of the population. This presentation describes a methodology that solves both these two obstacles using an EU-wide city definition, high-resolution data on population distribution and 'big data' on public transport stops and schedules. Because of these three new ingredients, it produces comparable indicators of the access to and supply of public transport in cities, relevant in the context of EU cohesion policy implementation and for the analysis of urban environmental topics. In particular, these indicators allow a comparison of the offer of public transport that is easily accessible to the urban population. In addition, summary indicators describing the frequency and speed of urban public transport services are proposed. The methodology relies upon the availability of standardised, interoperable and open data in the area of population distribution, transport networks and public transport operation. De-facto standards are increasingly being used, and the implementation of open data policies allows for easy indicator production in a growing number of cities and regions. Despite this positive evolution, extending and streamlining the proposed methodology will require an even wider availability of harmonised data. The implementation of the INSPIRE data themes, especially on transport networks and population distribution, and the emerging development of EU-wide standards and data on railway operation (RINF, TAP) offer perspectives for a much wider implementation of harmonised, comparable and policy-relevant indicators.