ABSTRACT

This chapter describes the nature and possible public-private partnerships in joint high speed rail (HSR) ventures. It develops the background to applying a specific partnership in Lillp. The chapter examines the important local government-private sector relationship that developed between the Train a Grande Vitesse developer and the Ville de Lille in France. The public sector is primarily responsibility for funding, owning and operating the infrastructure and providing the means to complete needed system design and mitigation planning and development. The private sector or quasi-public-private sector can be classified as the entity that owns and operates the HSR system in a "business like" manner with investment requirements, such as a threshold investment criterion, before a HSR investment is committed. Increasingly, national and global economic competition work together to significantly affect local governments incentive options and steal away those powers traditionally leveraged by the federal level in these western European governments.