Improving Urban Transport Performances by Tendering Lots: An Econometric Estimation of Natural Monopoly Frontiers

Recently, in order to reduce urban transit costs, some cities decided to divide their transport networks into several attractive and accessible parts and this procedure is called allotment. Gains obtained by introducing more competition for the market should be compared with costs associated with cutting the network into several parts, and this question is crucially linked to the measure of returns to scale.This paper will estimate a translog cost function on a panel of French urban transit networks. The main conclusion is that scale economies are exhausted for a production of about 7.5 millions vehicles-kilometres per year (corresponding to urban areas of about 200,000 inhabitants). Therefore, in terms of scale economies, allotment would reduce costs of public transport services for the seven biggest cities of our sample.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • The abbreviated totle for this paper is "Reducing Cost of Urban Public Transports by Tendering Lots?"
• Corporate Authors:

  World Conference on Transport Research Society

  Secretariat, 14 Avenue Berthelot
  69363 Lyon cedex 07,   France 
• Authors:
  • Roy, William
  • Croissant, Yves
• Conference:
  • 11th World Conference on Transport Research
  • Location: Berkeley CA, United States
  • Date: 2007-6-24 to 2007-6-28
• Publication Date: 2007

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: CD-ROM
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 45p
• Monograph Title: 11th World Conference on Transport Research

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Competition; Cost estimating; Public transit; Transit operating agencies; Urban transit
• Uncontrolled Terms: Cost function; Returns to scale
• Geographic Terms: France
• Subject Areas: Economics; Public Transportation; I10: Economics and Administration;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01122344
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Feb 19 2009 2:43PM