Papers and workshop on competition in land passenger transport (Thredbo13)

inno-V had a strong participation in the 13th International Conference on Competition and Ownership in Land Passenger Transport that was held in Oxford from 15 to 19 September 2013.

Didier van de Velde gave a plenary speech and paper on “Market initiative in public transport in Europe: recent developments” where he reviewed the growing role of deregulated markets in land passenger transport. Wijnand Veeneman gave a plenary speech and paper on the “Developments in public transport governance in The Netherlands”. Didier van de Velde gave, together with Prof. Chris Nash and Andrew Smith (Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds, UK) a plenary speech and paper on “Incentive misalignment and cost implications of vertical separation in railways”. David Eerdmans, together with Didier van de Velde and Wijnand Veeneman, delivered a paper “The emergence of hybrid service design regimes in Dutch public transport”, where developments in the usage of development teams in Dutch public transport contracts are compared.

During the conference, a workshop was organised on “Governance, Ownership and Competition in Deregulated Public Transport Markets”. This two day workshop, chaired by Didier van de Velde, examined regulatory options for deregulated markets, covering both local and long-distance markets (bus, coach and rail). The main discussions focussed on “how to make deregulation work?” This was fed by practical evidence from mature deregulated markets (such as buses in Great Britain outside London) and updates on countries such as Sweden, Japan and New Zealand, but also by emerging evidence on the liberalisation and deregulation of long-distance and international markets in Europe and elsewhere, both for coach and rail. The workshop involved 26 participants with 16 papers presenting evidence from seven countries. The papers in the workshop evaluated the functioning of the current regulatory regimes in the local bus markets of Britain, New Zealand, Sweden, Germany, Japan and Zimbabwe, regulatory reforms in the long-distance coach sector in Germany and the US, and railway reforms towards more open-access in the Czech Republic and Sweden.

A workshop report, summarising the workshop’s discussions is being prepared and will be published, together with further papers from the conference, in one of the coming issues of the scientific journal Research in Transportation Economics. The preliminary findings of this and the other workshops of the conference can be found on the conference’s website.

The objective of the conference series is to provide an international forum to examine passenger transport competition and ownership issues, reporting on recent research and experience and developing conclusions on key issues. The focus is on determining the effects of different forms of competition, ownership and organisation for land-based passenger transport on operators, users, governments / funders and society as a whole. The conference series is directed towards a broad audience of policy makers, planners, decision makers on infrastructure and service operators, consultants, researchers, academics and students, and is recognised as one of the most important international forums for analysis and debate of competition and ownership issues in land passenger transport.