Community of Metros

Community of Metros (also called CoMET) is a system of international railway benchmarking. CoMET consists of large metro systems from around the world. The 16 members of CoMET are the Beijing Subway, Berlin U-Bahn, Guangzhou Metro, Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway, London Underground, Mexico City Metro, Madrid Metro, Moscow Metro, New York City Subway, Paris Métro, Santiago Metro, Shanghai Metro, São Paulo Metro, Taipei Metro, Singapore Mass Rapid Transit and Delhi Metro. Each metro has a volume of at least 500 million passengers annually.^[1]

Objectives

The four main objectives of CoMET are:

To build measures to establish metro best practice.
To provide comparative information both for the metro board and the government.
To introduce a system of measures for management.
To prioritise areas for improvement.

History

Project between London Underground and Hamburger Hochbahn

In the UITP(International Association of Public Transport) conference of 1982, London Underground and Hamburger Hochbahn (The company that operates Hamburg U-Bahn) decided to create a benchmarking exercise to compare their two railways with additional data for other 24 metro systems.

Use of KPIs

The project was successful despite the fact that metros were very different in sizes, structures and accounting practices. However, CoMET used the Key Performance Indicator(KPIs) innovatively to solve the problem.

Group of Five

In 1994, the Mass Transit Railway of Hong Kong proposed to London Underground, Berlin U-Bahn, New York City Subway and Paris Métro to form a benchmarking consortium. Thus, the metros can exchange performance data and investigate best practice amongst similar heavy metros. These five metros are later known as the Group of Five.