Curb Rights Eliciting Competition and Entrepreneurship in Urban Transit

Urban transit in the United States has long been dominated by government ownership and regulation, and has been declining steadily in ridership and productivity (APTA 1995). An economist-cum-policy maker would seek to inject competition and entrepreneurship into the sector by privatizing it. The two types of privitization often advocated are contracting out and free competition (Department of Transportation 1984; Lave 1985; Gomez-Ibanez and Meyer 1993). Experience has shown, however, that each approach has serious shortcomnings