ABSTRACT
Taiwan’s high-speed rail system (HSR), which began operation in 2007, runs at speeds up to 300 km/h over 345 km of track from Taipei, the national capital, to Kaohshiung in the south. While it initially was planned as a government project, in the mid-1990s the Taiwan HSR project was reconceived in order to tap into private capital and private sector know-how. The project became a publicprivate partnership (PPP) in which the government handled land acquisition, the construction of one main tunnel and the Taipei Main Station, and agreed not to build a competing line. A build-operate-transfer (BOT) scheme was set up to build and run the new system under a 35-year concession to the private operator. The US $18 billion project, managed and operated by the Taiwan High Speed Rail Corporation (THSRC), was at the time of construction one of the largest build-operate-transfer projects in the world.
