ABSTRACT
The papers of Dodgson and Preston offer a relatively rare opportunity to compare and contrast the experience of two privatised modes of public transport in Great Britain - bus and rail. In the case of the bus industry, J. S. Dodgson considers a key issue to be the degree to which the industry is contestable, and few would argue with that. Dodgson refers to a study by NERA which prefers the ‘quality partnership’ approach to improving bus services rather than universal competitive tendering. He argues that the evidence that competitive tendering works much better than competition drawn on a comparison between London and the rest of Great Britain is spurious, because demographic and other trends are much more favourable to the bus in London than elsewhere. The rail industry is subject to substantial economies of density in terms of infrastructure use as well as the Mohring effect.
