The purpose of the presented paper is to provide a performance measure for evaluation of public transport system operations in urban areas. Such measure should reflect possible features, which constitute operation quality with the viewpoint of passengers. Many researchers have investigated and formulated various comprehensive measures of quality in urban public transport. Starting point for a formulation of equivalents is generalised cost of travel. Some examples of such approach are the guidelines of U.S. Federal Transit Administration. However, treated issue is still far from satisfying solutions. General requirements such as how to construct comprehensive measure of quality in urban public transport was provided in the QUATTRO - Project of EC. The author proposes "average equivalent travel time" as an attempt of quantification, taking into consideration many criteria for public transport operations. Synthetic performance measure is created by reduction of all assessments to the same dimension and then adding particular influences. The measure takes both, physical relationships and subjective assessments into account. Using results from foreign and the authors own investigations, the additive and multiplied model of performance measure has been proposed. Some of the investigations are results of theoretical and simulation analysis and some of them are results of passengers' interviews.