Overview
The current European context of industry and public service reform, together with debates over the effectiveness of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), has led to an acute need to analyse the French model for the organisation of urban transport provision. The variety of ways of organising passenger transport allows the performance of alternative organisational and contractual practices to be compared, and thus answer questions from the theocrat's and decision maker's perspective.
This research aimed to establish a link between the regulatory practices put into place in each urban transport network and the observable results in terms of service.
The analysis also aimed to measure the relative effectiveness of different networks with reference to the institutional configurations bringing together contracts between organising authorities and transport operators. These may be explicit (formal) contracts or implicit contracts (informal understandings, etc).
The research is founded on the common analysis of a database characterising the urban transport networks in France (from the GART - Grouping of French Authorities Responsible for Transport, CERTU - the French public study centre for urban and transport issues, and UTP - the French Union of Public Transport operators) and urban transport contracts.
After having defined how performance can be measured in this sector, the study undertakes an econometric treatment aimed at determining the influence of types of contracts. The results and the treatments are discussed in the framework of a working seminar bringing together representatives from public transport authorities, other public administrations and operators, with the objective of testing and then enriching working hypotheses.
Funding
Results
The results obtained show that the choice of the type of management and the type of operating contract have a decisive impact on the intensity of use of the production factors.
It was found that in effect, private operators are more efficient technically than mixed-economy (semi-public) operators. The mixed-economy operators appeared to be less efficient than publicly owned (e.g. municipal) companies.
The results also show that it is not wise for an authority wishing to improve the technical efficiency to propose a contract which specifies that the entire costs of the operator are to be reimbursed ex-post (management convention, or in French, convention de gérance).
Furthermore, it transpires that the best choice that an authority can make to attain the highest level of technical efficiency is to adopt fixed-price management contracts rather than ones in which real costs are compensated, as is currently practiced by a growing majority of public transport authorities.
Policy implications
These results contribute to the evaluation of different types of contract management for urban public transport operations. Nevertheless, the performance of networks is not limited to the technical efficiency of the operators; other criteria should be taken into account such as commercial effectiveness, quality of service, investment choice and tendering/contract costs.
Passenger
no results directly related to this theme
Urban
The current European context of industry and public service reform, together with debates over the effectiveness of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), has led to an acute need to analyse the French model for the organisation of urban transport provision. The variety of ways of organising passenger transport allows the performance of alternative organisational and contractual practices to be compared, and thus answer questions from the theocrat's and decision maker's perspective.
This research aimed to establish a link between the regulatory practices put into place in each urban transport network and the observable results in terms of service.
The analysis also aimed to measure the relative effectiveness of different networks with reference to the institutional configurations bringing together contracts between organising authorities and transport operators. These may be explicit (formal) contracts or implicit contracts (informal understandings, etc).
Rail
no results directly related to this theme
Efficiency
The analysis also aimed to measure the relative effectiveness of different networks with reference to the institutional configurations bringing together contracts between organising authoriti