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EVES-Rail study: Economic Effects of Vertical Separation in the rail sector

What are the consequences of separating operations and infrastructure? Is any particular model superior to others?

Rather than relying on a single methodological approach the study brings together several approaches and lines of evidence such as econometric analysis, qualitative research and practical experience.

The key findings are

  • Substantial country differences within the EU call for a differentiated approach rather than a one size-fits-it-all model
  • No structural model outperforms all others and competition within the railway sector does not seem to work better with vertical separation than with a holding company
  • In the case of separation, coordination mechanisms are needed to overcome misalignment throughout the value chain

More information can be found on the CER website.

European benchmarking of the costs, performance and revenues of train operations

The project compared a group of 17 operators from seven Western European countries who worked together with civity to collect and interpret a range of information on the cost, revenues and outputs of their organisations.

The study helps to position each peer group member with respect to their total costs and revenues per train or passenger kilometre, together with an elaboration of the underlying cost drivers such as drivers’ productivity, fleet structures and performance.

The results unveil significant cost differences in all service segments (commuter, regional and long distance services). For example, depending on factors such as available working hours and productive use of staff hours, train drivers’ costs vary by a factor of 2-3 per train hour. Also the mix of income from state funding and farebox revenues is quite different between countries and the UK is shown to be the country with the highest share of user financing and highest farebox revenues per passenger kilometre.

Springer published Arne Beck’s doctoral thesis on “Competition for Public Transport Services”

Using Germany as a case study, the author explains the dichotomous system of a market with licenses for commercial services, where operators are granted exclusivity, and licenses for non-commercial services, where supplementary direct subsidies are tendered out by public transport authorities.

civity is sponsor of the scientific conference “Municipal Infrastructure Management”

At the conference, research out of economics, law, public administration sciences as well as planning and engineering science will be presented, which addresses current problems with respect to municipal infrastructure management. Submission deadline for abstracts and papers is the 16th March of 2012.
Organisers are, inter alia, the Workgroup for Infrastructure Policy (WIP, TU Berlin), the German institute for urban development as well as the Institute for Climate Protection, Energy and Mobility – Law, Economics and Policy.

How can Britain obtain better value for money from its Transport Infrastructure?

How can we affordably build and maintain networks that will serve our transport needs in the coming decades? What changes are needed to improve the cost-effectiveness of our infrastructure? And what lessons can we learn from the way other nations build their networks? In the light of a number of recent reviews of our national transport infrastructure, the ITC hosted an expert discussion evening welcoming more than 40 senior experts, where Dr Heiner Bente, Chairman of the advisory board for civity, offered a response from an European perspective. ITC is Britain’s leading think tank and research charity devoted to the fields of transport and land use.