Evaluating the Evidence for Public Transport Regulatory Cycles

Regulation of public transport operators is theorised to feature a cyclical tendency from publicly owned monopoly to various types of private schemes and then back to public monopoly. This paper analyses the evidence for a regulatory cycle and whether there are stable regulatory regimes in the private sector. 104 regulatory regimes from every major world city were studied and only one full cycle was found. Many competitive regimes collapsed and were replaced with other competitive regimes, but there is no tendency to close the loop back to public monopolies. A few stable private sector competitive regimes were identified. Each regime is context dependent and there is evidence that some cities have successfully halted the regulatory cycle