This paper lays out a framework for managing complex asset systems, such as road networks, with a view to optimising life-cycle value of the asset base. It is based on discussions at the International transport Forum Roundtable on Sustainable Road Funding held in Paris 25-26 October 20121 and...

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...

India’s road network of over 4.1 million km is second largest in the world consisting of expressways, national highways, state highways, major district roads and other roads. These roads carry about 65 per cent of freight and 80 per cent of passenger traffic. National highways constitute only...

In 1993, the British government turned to the private sector to finance much needed investment in public infrastructure and manage services under its Public Private Partnerships (PPP) policy (Edwards et al., 2004), with transport forming by far the largest component by value of the PPP programme...

Many major airports are hubs for network carriers at the same time as serving a large local market. The complementarity between these functions is often seen as a prerequisite for viable hub operations, suggesting that spreading the hub network over multiple airports can be very costly and...

In most industrialised countries, it can be seen that urban mobility and car traffic have stagnated since the early 2000s. In France, the report on traffic conducted by the National Transport Accounts Commission shows a similar break in the trend, which was confirmed by household travel surveys...

This paper considers the choice between different approaches to contract for the construction and maintenance of infrastructure projects. The need to control for user costs over the life cycle of an asset is demonstrated to be a core aspect of contract design. The more likely it is that a...

Expanding airports is a topic which can easily make it to the first page of the national press. But this is highly unlikely as “bad news” is “good news” and most often failures and scandals make it to the front page. Berlin airport or the on-going failure to open up a nearly-complete new...

In early 2011, the Netherlands Institute for Transport Policy Analysis performed a mobility analysis, focussing on recent trends. This analysis showed that, following the remarkable growth in the 1980s and 1990s, the total national mobility of people in the Netherlands has not increased since...

This paper briefly discusses inter-modal coordination of transport services from a perspective of what could be called “diversity-based mobility policy”. It examines the framework conditions for inter-modal competition and coordination under an approach to transport policy making that...