Monitoring and Evaluation

Monitoring and evaluation activities deliver data about the progress of the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP) development process and the impact of policy measures. They are carried out before, during and after implementation of transport measures. Providing regular information to decision makers, potential funding bodies and local stakeholders can help to demonstrate that a SUMP has delivered, or will deliver, benefits to the community, provides value for money, is worth continuing or requires modifications to be successful.

Systematic monitoring and evaluation increases the efficiency of the planning process and implementation of measures, helps to optimise the use of resources and provides empirical evidence for future planning and appraisal of transport measures.

Typical challenges for the effective use of monitoring and evaluation are

• lack of experience;
• limited financial and staff resources;
• gaps in technical knowledge with regard to defining performance indicators, the retrieval, collection, preparation and interpretation of data; and
• inefficient monitoring and evaluation practices.

To tackle these issues, key recommendations regarding procedures, context, indicator selection, communication and process evaluation can be derived from existing experiences and are provided on the following page. The figure below illustrates how monitoring and evaluation activities are embedded in the SUMP development.

Are you curious to know more about how to assess the impact of measures and evaluate planning processes? Further information can be found in the Monitoring & Evaluation Kit and the various SUMP knowledge resources CH4LLENGE produced!