This paper reviews the development of thought on the major issues in transit economics over the last 50 years, in developed and developing countries. Some issues - the analysis of cost and demand parameters - are perennial, with development mostly in the mathematical sophistication of analytical...

This paper analyses the determinants of the performance differential between the private and public management of urban public transport in Europe. Our analysis supports the view that private management is associated with a lower operating cost. We show, however, that the size of the costs'...

The workshop included presentations of nine papers covering very different types of situations and transitions. Some papers were region specific (Russia, Middle East, Asia, Europe, and two from Latin America) and others were of general applicability. The discussion highlights that virtually all...

Authority intervention in the public transport sector has a long history and has led to a growing corps of legal texts in European countries. These texts are often divergent, if not incompatible. This was no problem until the rather recent internationalization of the sector. With this...

This paper explores a selection of recently proposed bootstrapping techniques to estimate non-parametric convex (DEA) cost frontiers and efficiency scores for transit firms. Using a sample of Norwegian bus operators, the key results can be summarized as follows: (i) the bias implied by...

This chapter analyses appropriate regulatory instruments for public transport markets under monopoly and competition, respectively. For the monopoly case, the operator chooses too low supply, compared to welfare optimum. In contrast, for the competition case the operators choose too high supply,...

This paper reviews 10 years of passenger rail franchising in Great Britain and highlights problems in three areas: the tension between commercial and social objectives; the presence of risks and uncertainty; and vulnerability to strategic behaviour such as low-balling, chiselling and back...

This paper uses individual worker and municipal information to examine privatization's influence on public transit workers' earnings and employment. OLS findings on labor earnings reveal that privatization is associated with an erosion of the public transit union premium. These labor earning...

This paper describes the development of approaches to analysing the links between investment in transit and economic development. It indicates the need to bring together disparate approaches from urban economics and transportation economics to get a full understanding and uses recent results on...

This paper replaces the nested logit [`]trick' used in estimation of a modal choice model, when stated preference (SP) and revealed preference (RP) data are pooled, with an error component mixed logit model that can (i) relax the IID condition attached to subsets of alternatives in nested logit...