Numerous countries have attempted to improve the performance of their railways by introducing more competition, but there is fierce debate and no consensus on how this is best achieved. This book reveals how railways were an obvious target for reform because they were often losing traffic and money, and because the government was typically deeply involved as either owner or regulator.
Throughout the world, the rail industry historically has been one of the most extensively regulated of all industrial sectors. In the past three decades however, policymakers and economists have become increasingly critical of traditional regulation of the rail industry and it is generally accepted that in markets where transportation carriers seek to meet demand, there is habitually effective competition. Today, facilitating competition in the railroad transport industry is frequently seen as beneficial. Introducing competition enhances efficiency and innovation in the competitive rail activities, enhances the range and variety of products available to consumers, and focuses the regulatory interventions on the core of the underlying network market problems. This book examines the underlying policies and tools to promote competition in the railroad market. Two of these tools, vertical separation and the enforcement of intramodal competition, are examined in more details. This book aims at decision makers faced with the regulation of railroad industry and people interested in the actual and future setting of railroad competition all over the world.
This title was first published in 2000. This work looks at the privatization of British Rail. It covers the competition for franchises and the regulation of those franchises. The study evaluates the extent to which the promotion of competition was an appropriate policy goal in the privatization of British rail. The book examines the rail system as a whole and looks at the prospects for the future.
The coming of the railways signalled the transformation of European society, allowing the quick and cheap mass transportation of people and goods on a previously unimaginable scale. By the early decades of the twentieth century, however, the domination of rail transport was threatened by increased motorised road transport which would quickly surpass and eclipse the trains, only itself to be challenged in the twenty-first century by a renewal of interest in railways. Yet, as the studies in this volume make clear, to view the relationship between road and rail as a simple competition between two rival forms of transportation, is a mistake. Rail transport did not vanish in the twentieth century any more than road transport vanished in the nineteenth with the appearance of the railways. Instead a mutual interdependence has always existed, balancing the strengths and weaknesses of each system. It is that interdependence that forms the major theme of this collection. Divided into two main sections, the first part of the book offers a series of chapters examining how railway companies reacted to increasing competition from road transport, and exploring the degree to which railways depended on road transportation at different times and places. Part two focuses on road mobility, interpreting it as the innovative success story of the twentieth century. Taken together, these essays provide a fascinating reappraisal of the complex and shifting nature of European transportation over the last one hundred years.
The book presents and compares the new relationships between transport authorities and railway companies in a number of countries (Great Britain, Sweden, Japan, Germany, Switzerland and France). It also presents a number of case studies focusing on the role of contracts, competition and tendering and presenting the achievements of the new regimes so far. This book is aimed at all transport professionals, authorities and academics interested in the increasing use of competition in the passenger railway sector.
