MARETOPE - Managing and Assessing Regulatory Evolution in local public Transport Operations in Europe
Overview
Background & policy context:
Previous research identified the legal and regulatory frameworks of urban public transport (UPT). However, during the last years significant changes in these frameworks occurred or are starting to occur in several cities over Europe. Simultaneously, the European Comission (EC) started a process leading to an appropriate legal framework at European level, stressing the need of more transparent and competitive environments for public transport.
All these different initiatives are contributing to an overall modification of public transport organisation.
Objectives:
The overall objective of the MARETOPE project was to investigate in an integrated way the impacts of change on the roles and activities of the different stakeholders: public transport operators, public authorities, users and producers of transport means and systems.
Furthermore, it also focused on the identification of barriers that hindered and/or simply delayed the adaptation to change and the development of tools to support decision-makers in that process and in the management of transition periods. From a strategical point of a view, the research objectives can be synthesised as follows:
- to promote a harmonisation of concepts, based on the review of previous studies, and aimed at establishing a common framework for the understanding of concepts and terminology;
- to update views on legal, organisational and financial frameworks in urban public transport operations in Europe, Norway, Switzerland and Accession countries;
- to carry out a detailed and in-depth assessment of 31 case studies covering a variety of situations in Europe, Norway and Hungary. Case studies are meant to collect quantitative data and qualitative information underlying the cause-effect processes behind the change phenomenon;
- to assess the impacts of change in economic and financial performance in selected cases, as well as to identify the main barriers to change and social impacts of change;
- to develop tools to overcome or at least minimise barrier effects and to support the different actors in the change process;
- to develop guidelines and recommendations for the management of transition periods.
Methodology:
The progress of MARETOPE, was divided into three main stages:
- a first one dedicated to the harmonisation of concepts, state of the art of regulatory reform in the different countries, data collection on change processes (WP1 and WP2);
- a second one dedicated to the in-depth analysis of impacts, barriers and tools (WP3 and WP4);
- and a third one fully devoted to the production of guidelines and recommendations on change management (WP5).
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