Articles

The Swedish Public Transport Association has adopted recommendations on incentives for increased ridership in tendered contracts, though there is little evidence on how public transport contracts should be designed to reach this goal. This study begins amassing the needed evidence by analyzing the performance of four Stockholm Region bus contracts spanning seven years, examining the new E20 contracts intended to increase ridership, customer satisfaction, and efficiency. These contracts employ 100 percent of payments to operators depending on the number of boarding and paying passengers. Using mostly monthly data, outcomes in E20-contracts in four areas (formerly governed by gross cost contracts) over three years are compared with outcomes in the years before the E20 contracts were implemented, and with two gross contracts running parallel to the E20 contract. Compared with gross cost operators in comparison areas, E20 operators performed better in terms of costs, customer satisfaction (initially worse but then better), punctuality, and canceled departures, but worse in number of departures and no better in number of passengers.

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The supply of public transport in Sweden has been continuously increasing and as a consequence thereof, the cost for bus traffic has also increased. However, many indicators show that costs for public transports in Sweden in recent years have increased more than supply. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to test and evaluate the importance of the nine previously identified cost drivers (Camén & Lidestam, 2016) of public bus transports in Sweden. A mixed-method design, which included both focus groups and a questionnaire, was used. The questionnaire, with quantitative rating scales, was sent to representatives from the bus operators and from the Public Transport Authorities (PTAs). In the focus groups, industry associations, consultants, and politicians also participated. The results reveal what the dominating cost factors are, as well as the factors considered to be the most important, according to actors within the Swedish bus transport sector. The most important cost driver identified is peak traffic and the costs of its consequences. Read the article here:

The need to decrease emissions from the transport sector is getting urgent and public transport can play an important role in the transition to low emission fuels. To a large extent, public transport in Europe is provided by regional authorities who controls the traffic to a varying degree, from complete public monopoly to competitive tendering. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyse how the organisation of the public bus transport market influences the introduction of renewable fuels. The focus is on understanding what the motivation is for the use of different organisational forms and what challenges and opportunities the authorities in a region encounter during the introduction of renewable fuels. Interviews with authorities in ten Swedish public transport regions show that when functional requirements are used in competitive tendering it will exclusively result in the cheapest renewable fuel available. Thus, if new fuels or technologies should be able to enter the market, either it will be necessary for regional authorities to take more control using specific requirements or publicly management, or the national government must introduce policy instruments that enable new renewable fuels to become competitive on the market.

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The creation of an efficient public transport system increasingly requires collaboration between independent organizations. Institutional reforms in Europe have created governance situations where collaboration between organizations is a critical issue, and examples include the integration of transport and land-use planning and the planning of large public transport projects. The organizational context of public transport, with several formal, discrete organizations that need to collaborate, raises questions about how functioning collaborations can be accomplished. This paper examines how to create functioning collaboration between organizations in the public transport sector. We depart from a theory of collaboration as a stepwise trust-building process, and we present results from a comparative case study of collaboration in two Swedish public transport projects. The results show some of the prerequisites that must be in place in order for the collaboration to work, but also the boundaries of what collaborative approaches can bring about. Conditions such as honest, open, and inclusive dialog between stakeholders and resources in the form of finance, knowledge, mandate, and leadership are important. While there is no guarantee that this will lead to differences in interests being resolved, the results indicate that it improves the chances of finding compromises that all of the involved stakeholders can accept, especially if favorable conditions for collaboration are established at an early stage of the planning process. Building on these findings, we suggest some practical recommendations for improving collaboration in future public transport projects. These practical recommendations are aimed at improving the handling of unavoidable conflicts in collaboration in a constructive way.

The purpose of the paper is to analyse informal collaboration in the public transport sector. Two Swedish case studies, Living lab Uddevalla and Guidelines for Regional BRT are analysed and compared concerning what kind of learning occurred and what lessons regarding informal collaboration to draw from the two cases. For both cases the analysis indicates that individual, single loop learning is the most striking type of learning among the participants. The voluntary approach of the two cases has advantages and drawbacks. Advantages include that participants were truly interested in the issues of collaboration, which created energy and contributed to building trust. The main drawback identified was that in both cases the voluntary enthusiasm of the participants collided with the formal requirements of planning and decision making. This has stifled the possibility of the informal collaboration processes to induce change in prevailing practices.

State, regional, and municipal authorities, public transport authorities, and traffic operators at many levels are essential actors in public transport. This paper presents a typology of four coordination mechanisms relevant to interactions among public transport actors. These four mechanisms, i.e. ownership/instruction, contracts, partnerships, and mutual understanding, are all based on basic coordination mechanisms of markets, hierarchies, and networks. A case of timetable planning is examined, because inter-organisational coordination between actors is crucial in this field, and the usefulness of the typology is illustrated via three examples. The results stem from a Danish study of institutional constraints on timetable optimisation in inter-organisational relations. The empirical focus is eastern Denmark, including Greater Copenhagen.

Departing from open innovation (OI), this case study explores the development of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) in West Sweden. An analysis of 19 interviews reveals how representatives from involved actors perceive internal and external barriers as hampering the regional public transport authority’s attempts to collaborate with private actors, and that the perception of barriers is incongruent across public and private actors. Transferability to other cases of public–private OI is discussed, and implications for public actors are proposed. The paper expands the knowledge of preconditions for MaaS’ development and of the unique conditions for OI in public–private settings.

Recent research on public transport has seen increasing focus on issues like coordination, collaboration and steering in complex governance settings. One of the themes in this field of research is related to partnership approaches, as one way of stimulating functioning collaboration between formally independent private and public organisations. The aim of this paper is to explore the role and function of partnerships as a way of supporting well-functioning public transport networks and services in fragmented institutional settings. The empirical focus is on partnerships between operators and public (transport) authorities in two different legal settings: England and Sweden. The analysis is based on interviews with operators and public transport authorities in two metropolitan regions in each country where innovative partnership working has been developed to deal with various types of barriers to delivering better public transport. The results show the key qualities of these partnerships that are required for them to function. Although the regulatory contexts are very different, the partnership qualities are very similar in both cases.