ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter highlights a trend for a set of ‘public-private partnerships’ or ‘hybrid models’ to increasingly be seen as best practice in public transport for a wide range of international contexts. In particular, most interest here is in the models in which a public agency takes responsibility for the excellence of an integrated system and delegates delivery of efficient services to business enterprises under service contracts, often with competitive tendering. Rising interest in such approaches might not seem to be a case of ‘reasserting’ the role of the public sector. In fact, opposition in some countries has involved characterising such reforms as ‘privatisation’. However, with a more global perspective, the emergence of public sector agencies taking the lead on detailed system planning can actually be seen to mark the defeat of a longstanding push for deregulation. It represents a triumph for public planning over more purely market-led arrangements. Furthermore, the starting point for such reforms outside the West has generally not been public monopoly but the lightly regulated private provision of public transport. It should thus be seen as very much an assertion of a vital role for the public sector. I term this approach, ‘proactive planning with service contracting’ rather than simply ‘service contracting’ (which is more familiar in the literature) in order to emphasise that well-focused and ambitious public sector planning is seen here as a vital aspect of the model, which should not be understood simply in terms of its approach to contracting out. Also of interest here is the question of how widely applicable the more ambitious approaches to proactive planning with service contracting will prove to be in low-income cities. Case studies examined here provide cause for cautious optimism. A surprisingly diverse and international range of cities with a wide range of income levels have been adopting such approaches, although their starting points and pathways for these reforms have varied enormously. Which reform trajectories are feasible is clearly also an important question for would-be regulatory reformers. In the section below I provide an overview of the regulatory trends over many decades, culminating in a push for deregulation followed by disappointment and
a recent search for alternatives. Then, I highlight a number of illustrative cities which provide a picture of diverse starting points and trajectories towards an ambitious approach to public sector planning combined with private sector operation of public transport services. This is followed by a synthesis of lessons learned. Before proceeding further it is important to define what is meant by the term, public transport. As used here, it refers to passenger transport services which are available to the general public and which are run regularly (or semi-regularly) on fixed (or semi-fixed) routes. It is equivalent in common usage to the North American term, transit. The word ‘public’ in public transport need not imply state ownership, nor even public sector management or planning. With this conception of public transport, taxis are excluded but ‘jitney’ style services by minivans are included. In some cities, shared taxis can straddle a grey area at the boundary between taxi service and fixed-route public transport.
