New Ways in Public Transport

Just like most Transport Authorities and Public Transport officials the National Public Transport Authority of Israel wants to trigger the shift from private transportation to public transportation. To meet this challenge, the Authority decided to listen to their stakeholders and turn them into their consultants. In a collaborative process starting in 2015 the basis for a strategic plan was created. The National Public Transport Authority of Israel decided to turn to Insights.US, a start-up that specializes in inclusive decision making with a unique web-based technology.

The first stage begun with reaching out to more than 1,000 stakeholders in Israel representing a diverse group of transportation experts, passengers, public transportation personnel, operators, government employees and government officials. Hundreds of answers were submitted from which 10 game-changing insights were aggregated. The challenge was to define the building blocks of the new strategy.

Reviewing the insights, the authority learned that they can foster the massive shift from private to public transportation by focusing on two areas, namely transportation management and passenger experience. This prioritization set the stage for a second round of gathering advice from stakeholders and would focus on the two aforementioned areas.

This second round, conducted in Spring 2016, added more than 670 pieces of advice, including more than 50 contributions of international transportation experts who added their advice in a parallel consultation – among them lots of members of EMTA. In order to reach out to these members and gain their advice for the strategic plan, Insights.US contacted EMTA’s former Secretary General Jonathan Goldberg, who is now based in Jerusalem and gave the introduction to EMTA’s current Secretary General Ruud van der Ploeg. The responses and the collective insights of both rounds of consultation formed the basis of the new strategic plan, which the National Public Transport Authority is currently writing its final draft.

Insights.US is operating in Washington DC, Berlin and Tel Aviv, and powered almost 400 projects with 500k stakeholders in various fields. The SaaS-solution uses the crowds not only to get the advice – but also to refine it into insights, so that the decision makers do not need to wade through tons of responses. “Our job is to enable decision makers to find and integrate the knowledge of their stakeholders”, explains Christian Davepon from the Berlin Office, who managed the international consultation. “It’s important to have a diverse group – in this case experts, officials and passengers – from Israel and abroad – This is why we turned to experts of associations like EMTA and interviewed them in order get their perspective on the challenge and potential solutions” adds Davepon.

In the next few months the final plan is expected to be published. It will be the first time that thousands of participants, among them the passengers themselves, will get updates on their personal impact to the creation of a strategic plan for public transportation. For examining the insights of the international consultation check out this link for Transport Management and this link for Passenger Experience.

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The article was released on the EMTA website and last updated on 15th November 2016.