Spotlight on services

By Louise Shearer

I met the Council’s Executive Manager of Transport Operations Michael Craigie one day, and he mentioned that his team have been developing more meaningful indicators to measure the impact his service is having in the community. I thought that exploring this a bit further would make a great ‘Spotlight On’ feature.

Michael – you mentioned that you’ve been reviewing how you measure your service performance: can you tell me a little more about that and why you’ve decided to do it?

Transport is all about outcomes – in other words, the difference we want to make to people’s lives in the community. Finding the right measures to use is something we’ve struggled with a bit for a while now. We report on how many people travel on our buses and ferries, which is probably mildly interesting, but without any context, figures like those are quite difficult to make sense of. For example, a reduction in cars on a ferry could actually be as a result of folk being encouraged to cycle, or it could be that people have decided to take the bus to work.

We want to be able to meaningfully describe the difference we’re making, and to do that we’re going to spend time gathering baseline information so that when we repeat the process we have two sets of data to compare.

What has prompted you to make these changes now?

I think there have been a couple of key motivators.

The Shetland Transport Strategy was refreshed in June 2018 and Shetland’s Partnership Plan was agreed in July 2018. Both of those are key strategic documents for how we shape and direct service delivery over the next few years.

I want to make sure we’re reporting on what matters to people rather than spending time reporting on what perhaps isn’t so meaningful.

What it boils down to is one simple question – are our communities better connected or not?

Once the Shetland Transport Strategy was agreed, we started work on the new Delivery Plan and that is what sets out the new performance measures. One of my team, Robina Barton, has been instrumental in developing that piece of work, so it would be useful for you to speak to her.

I caught up with Robina and asked her for a bit more detail on the work she’s been doing.

When I joined the team, we were reporting on 40 different indicators, but those weren’t necessarily providing a clear indication of how we’re performing as a service.

The way we work now is much more ‘outcome’ focused and the challenge has been to demonstrate how those outcomes have been achieved.

There are four priorities in Shetland’s Partnership Plan – Place, People, Participation and Money – and so initially I considered what we should be measuring that would demonstrate how we are contributing to these.

I also spent some time looking at what other local authorities and public bodies have been doing in this area and I reviewed the Place Standard survey work from 2016. That was an extremely useful piece of work that helped the Council assess the qualities of a place and helped people identify their priorities for their immediate area.

The new Shetland Transport Strategy notes that “As a statutory community planning partner and member of the Shetland Partnership, ZetTrans target outcome, in line with Shetland’s Partnership Plan, is to:

Increase the Shetland Place Standard ‘score’ for Public Transport from a baseline of 3.6 in 2016 to 5 by 2028.

This change will signify that, by 2028, fewer Shetland residents will feel there is a need to improve public transport in the islands.”

(ZetTrans is the statutory body responsible for the provision and maintenance of public transport services in the Shetland Islands.)

What I’ve managed to do is whittle down the long list of 40 to 14 useful indicators, focusing on people’s perception of transport. We will continue to measure some elements of usage but we’ll probably want to break that down to look at different kinds of users. There’s also a move to encourage more active travel so we’ll want to be measuring walking and cycling and the positive impact that can have.

Can you tell me a bit more about the indicators you’ve developed?

One of our outcomes is to make sure that ‘lifeline services develop in line with current and changing need to support Shetland’s community and industries’.

What we’ll be looking at here is how we improve people’s perceptions of the quality of external transport services and we’ll measure that by looking at the percentage of users who are very or fairly satisfied with that quality.

Another of our outcomes is to make sure that ‘inter-island transport services also develop in the same way, according to local community and industry need’. Similarly, we’ll measure this by analysing the percentage of users very or fairly satisfied with our inter-island transport services.

We want to see an increased use of Shetland’s public bus network (which will directly and positively impact on our carbon footprint) and for that we’ll continue to monitor bus service usage levels.

So you don’t need to start gathering your own baseline data for everything?

No – we already gather some of the data. I mentioned before that we will continue to gather some usage stats where those are relevant. We can also make use of other existing data such as the Scottish Household Survey, which, for example, can tell us how people feel about the quality of local public transport.

One of your outcomes is to support people to make positive travel choices – can you tell me a bit about that please?

There are two aspects to this. First of all, we know we need to improve on the way travel information is presented. For example, the current paper bus timetables can be quite difficult to interpret, and the digital travel information we have available provides an alternative which we’d like to develop further. Earlier this month, Transport Planning staff underwent training on ArcGIS software, thanks to funding from Sustrans, which will allow us to create digital maps of the bus network and provide better information online. As well as bus times and locations, this will also be able to incorporate information about accessibility.

The other aspect to encouraging positive travel choices is providing the capability for personal journey planning, integrating the different modes of transport across Shetland. We are exploring how we can further develop the ZetTrans app to allow this functionality.

I also noticed on ‘engagement’ you want to make sure the Shetland community is fully engaged in the process of transport planning. That one interested me as I know from the most recent Scottish Household Survey and our own Customer First Survey that more people are interested in getting involved in decision making.

One of the ways we’ve already started doing this is by setting up six-monthly Area Transport Forums. The main purpose of these is to develop ongoing, regular two-way engagement with communities. In August/September 2019, we held 16 events across Shetland to inform the development of the new network of bus contracts, which will come into effect in August this year. The next round of forums is scheduled for this month (March 2020), where we will be getting community input into a new Active Travel Strategy for Shetland.

I finished off my interview by catching up with Michael again.

As you can see, many of the new indicators are about measuring satisfaction. It’s not precise metrics as you’re trying to understand how people feel. “I am able to reach the things I need to reach” is someone’s perception of how good transport is according to their need. We’ll just need to be careful that we undertake regular surveys to understand those perceptions and that we balance the ‘qualitative’ data with ‘quantitative’ measures. We’re also very aware of the importance of not over-burdening communities and businesses with consultation so we will be linking into any engagement processes happening across the Council with the aim of avoiding duplication and ‘consultation fatigue’.

Transport is a service that doesn’t exist for its own good – it must enable economic and community outcomes to support and realise benefits to Shetland. The new indicators we’ve devised will help us understand exactly how we contribute and where focus increasingly scarce resources.