Following the Hatfield accident in October 2000, the cost of running Britain's railways has increased very sharply, leading to considerable debate about whether current cost levels are reasonable. This paper seeks to inform this debate by assessing post-Hatfield cost and TFP levels against the...

To scrutinise the plausible sources of poor performance for non-storable transport services, it is necessary to distinguish technical inefficiency from service ineffectiveness. This paper attempts to measure the performance of railways that produce passenger and freight services by two...

This paper describes spatial effects of transport pricing in England. It presents detailed results from a model developed to test the effects of a range of charging scenarios across England. In developing these scenarios we make use of estimates of the marginal social costs of travel, exploring...

In a horizontal product differentiation model, it is shown that a stable service pattern in scheduled transport competition only exists if consumers are sufficiently sensitive to the quality of non-scheduling service characteristics. Since this sensitivity is related to travel distance, the...

How many firms choose to adopt flextime without any policy intervention? Does promoting flextime improve social welfare? This paper addresses these two questions. We extend the model of bottleneck congestion to describe the case in which some firms in a city adopt flextime. The model also...

In the recent literature, empirical tests of stationarity of freight rates often conclude that spot freight rates are non-stationary processes. However, many maritime economists would argue that the freight rate cannot exhibit asymptotically explosive behaviour, as implied by non-stationarity,...

Traffic risk mitigation remains a challenging aspect of highway concessions. This paper evaluates three mechanisms applied in Chile to mitigate traffic risk: the 'Minimum Income Guarantee' (MIG); the 'Least Present Value of the Revenues' (LPVR); and the 'Revenue Distribution Mechanism' (RDM)....

This paper critiques the central and subsidiary forecasts that underpin technical discussions on runway and terminal capacity in the 2003 White Paper on the Future Development of Air Transport (Department for Transport, 2003). The central forecasts are based upon short run econometric...

Despite the increasing trend of airport privatisation and deregulation in recent years, few studies have analysed how the pricing behaviour of unregulated airports affects downstream airline competition, especially the competition between airlines offering differentiated services such as the...

This paper outlines and critically reflects upon the key features of the UK Department for Transport's Project Appraisal Framework for Ports. Significant concerns are raised in connection with the treatment of demand, capacity, and the extent to which the framework adequately addresses the...