The paper presents the results of a research on railway regulation and liberalisation in Italy, France, Germany and Spain. The analysed fields of regulation are the relationship between the State and the rail companies, network access conditions by operators, slot allocating and pricing schemes...

Infrastructures have been traditionally built, maintained and operated by the public sector. Road and railway networks, energy, electricity and water were traditionally designed in public sector headquarters in many countries until the eighties. Since then, and due to fiscal crisis and public...

This paper presents a new mechanism for awarding tolled-highways, based on the variable-term concept proposed by Engel et al (1997). These authors claim that a mechanism based on bids for least-present-value of revenue (LPVR) eliminates the risk of demand and simplifies renegotiations. However,...

Private participation in the construction and operation of road infrastructure ia a way to deal with tight budget constraints and increasing demand for additional road capacity. Fixed term concessions has been the standard contract between the the public sector and private operators with poor...

This paper revises the underlining principles of the European transport policy and analizes how these principle have been translated into policy in the recent past. The analysis is based in three ideas: the vertical integration/unbundling of infrastructure and services as a mechanism which...

What is the total cost of building, maintaining and operating a new high speed rail (HSR) line? Trying to answer this question is the main objective of this paper. To address it we will make an extensive use a database containing information about 166 actual HSR projects in 20 countries is...

High Speed Railways (HSR) is currently regarded as one of the most significant technological breakthroughs in passenger transportation developed in the second half of the 20th century. At the beginning of 2008 there were about 10,000 kilometres of new high speed lines in operation around the...

Public transport (urban and intercity) is organized in Spain both through concession contracts and public ownership. The regulator fixes prices and level of services,as well as the level of subsidy. This paper examines the regulated system in the Spanish bus industry in the last decades.

Private sector participation in infrastructure projects traditionally financed by governments (roads, airports, seaports) is increasing around the world. This paper describes how a toll road concession works. It discusses how the usual mechanism, based on a concession contract with a...