The Swiss railway system is known for its high quality of service and integration in a particularly dense public transport system. People are generally less aware of ongoing institutional reform. This article strives to shed light on passenger transport reform, and more particularly on regional...

This paper describes recent developments in the governance of public transport in the Netherlands, focusing on bus, tram, metro and regional train concessions. Most of these concessions are competitively tendered. Competitive tendering was introduced in 2001 and Dutch authorities have since...

Dutch public transport provision has been competitively tendered out increasingly since 2001. Except for the Amsterdam city bus services, all bus transport in the country is carried out under a competitively tendered contact. Several evaluations have been carried out on the effects of...

With the aim to improve efficiency and value for money, in addition to tendered services the European Commission approach to rail organisation allows substantial open access rail services in both passenger and freight operations. This paper investigates, from a transaction cost perspective,...

In this paper, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is used to evaluate the performance of individual bus lines composing the public transport network in Thessaloniki, Greece. Results showed that efficiency of local bus lines is slightly better than operational effectiveness without indicating a...

Since 2011, very significant developments have occurred in the procurement and contracting of bus services in major Australian cities. After many years of ‘grandfathering’ (continuing rollover of negotiated contracts with long-established private operators), competitive tendering has been...

The opening to competition in Germany's regional railway transport is interesting to investigate as some EU countries find it difficult to move towards the implementation of European Union Guidelines. In this paper, we investigate Leipzig's regional passenger railway services opening to...

The role played by market initiative regimes in public transport in Europe is growing. Initially limited to Great Britain outside London (1986), a watered down version was implemented in Sweden in 2012, while the 2013 German public transport law allows increasing the role of ‘commercial’...

This paper uses qualitative and comparative analysis to reveal two important findings. First, in France, if the aim of reform announced by the Minister is to re-build the SNCF's monopoly, our fear is that, instead of stimulating French railways, this will cause a downward slide in the sector by...

In Europe, many countries have completely separated their railways into totally separate infrastructure managers and railway undertakings (train operators) and the European Commission has sought to make such complete vertical separation a legal requirement.