Inbook,
Competition and Ownership in Land Passenger Transport: Selected Papers from the 8th International Conference (Thredbo 8) in Rio de Janeiro, September 2003
chapter First Experience with Tendering at the Tactical Level (Service Design) in Dutch Public Transport, page 195--211. Elsevier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, (2005)
Abstract
This chapter describes how the long awaited competitive tendering
of the Dutch public transport has now begun. The first round of tendering
showed that transport authorities chose for a wide variety of approached
in tendering procedures and contractual clauses. The main question
addressed in this paper is whether the legislator’s aims with the
enactment of the Passenger Transport Act 2000 are being realized
with the current transport authorities’ behavior. One of these aims
was to give more service design freedom to the operators in return
for a clearer definition of the public transport goals by the authorities.
After presenting the reform and its aims in a nutshell, this chapter
presents three recent cases of competitive tendering in the Netherlands:
Amersfoort, South-Holland DAV and Utrecht-Northwest. These cases
were chosen for their diversity in approach and for the role that
the tactical level (service design) plays either at the tendering
stage or during the contractual period. In the third section, the
paper presents a theoretical framework for looking at the evolving
institutions in public transport in the Netherlands, and this will
help to analyze the possible barriers to the realization of the aims
of the new act. This will be detailed in the fourth section, which
reports on its own enquiry that attempts to identify the reasons
used by authorities in order to make specific choices in favor or
against the transfer of tactical freedoms to the operators. After
presenting a short outlook on the coming period, the last section
of the chapter presents some conclusions.
