Public transit ridership tumbled amid the COVID-19 pandemic, contributing to enormous budget deficits and prompting slashed or eliminated service offerings across the United States. These service cuts may cause a vicious cycle and end up hurting the most vulnerable riders who cannot afford to...

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...

The role played by market initiative regimes in public transport in Europe is growing. Initially limited to Great Britain outside London (1986), a watered down version was implemented in Sweden in 2012, while the 2013 German public transport law allows increasing the role of ‘commercial’...

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems have existed for more than 50 years, but they are still uncommon and unfamiliar. This review article synthesizes the findings of 42 papers which have discussed reasons for the slow adoption of BRT. Eleven causes were identified and the causes are usually different...

Since 2011, very significant developments have occurred in the procurement and contracting of bus services in major Australian cities. After many years of ‘grandfathering’ (continuing rollover of negotiated contracts with long-established private operators), competitive tendering has been...

Competitive tendering of local bus services in Germany has received increased attention. Employing Seemingly Unrelated Regression analyses, we observe that prices have regionally varying determinants; for example, while prices throughout most of the federal state of Hesse increase over time,...

How to protect “captive shippers” from monopolistic abuses by a railway? In an “open access” system, it’s straightforward: provide infrastructure access to a competing train operating company. In a system without open access – as in, for example, the United States, Canada, Mexico,...