This paper assesses the impact of European rail transport regulation in the past 25 years. It highlights competition as a necessary condition to overcome the inertia of legacy railway operators, but argues that competition is not sufficient to increase efficiency when they feel protected by the...

This paper assesses the impact of European rail transport regulation in the past 25 years. It highlights competition as a necessary condition to overcome the inertia of legacy railway operators, but argues that competition is not sufficient to increase efficiency when they feel protected by the...

Railway efficiency is a topic of interest worldwide for railway managers operating in competitive markets and for fiscally strained governments. Several recent studies indicate that European railways differ in terms of their efficiency. Based on a comparison with some major non-European railway...

Assessing railway efficiency is complex for a number of reasons. Railways produce a wide range of outputs including passenger service, freight service and, in some cases, separated infrastructure access services. Railways that differ in scale or in the mix of these services inherently differ in...

In this paper we first consider alternative measures of efficiency. We explain why simple partial productivity measures are inadequate as the basis of overall measures of efficiency, and outline two alternative approaches. The first is technical efficiency - the degree to which output is...

This paper examines whether the results of cost-benefit analyses (CBA) for road and rail projects can be compared with each other. Road and rail projects address different transport needs and aim to solve different problems. This does not make comparisons between CBAs for each mode impossible,...

Railway efficiency is a topic of interest worldwide for railway managers operating in competitive markets and for fiscally strained governments. Several recent studies indicate that European railways differ in terms of their efficiency. Based on a comparison with some major non-European railway...

In almost all cases, the transport industry has adopted safety management systems (SMS) in response to a regulatory initiative. SMS vary dramatically across transport modes and jurisdictions - often because of the influence of different legacy regulatory programmes, and the attendant cultures....