Required Capabilities for Contracting out Tactical Level Decisions of Bus Transport to Private Operators

Aghdasi, M; Asadi, Y

Required Capabilities for Contracting out Tactical Level Decisions of Bus Transport to Private Operators

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Abstract

Promoting people to use bus transport services leads to decrease using private cars and therefore decrease heavy traffic jam and air pollution. Promoting people to use the services needs to provide better services with lower cost. To achieve the goal, private operators must find innovative ways to provide the services. Providing the innovative services is not possible, unless the operators have freedom to make decision about tactical level decision (determining ticket rate and type, routes, vehicle type and timetables) besides operational level decisions. In other words, they design and operate the services themselves. Operator freedom leads to emerge challenges like lack of route integration that create the problems and decrease popularity of bus services. In this paper, the challenges are collected by using published case study reports of various cities and conducting semi structural interviews with bus transport experts. The root causes of them are found by more investigations in the literature and interviews. The results of the paper show that transferring the tactical level decisions to private operators successfully, transport authority as well as private operators should have some capabilities like, ability to control and monitoring and integrated information system. These capabilities are defined by using published case study reports and conducting interviews. Transaction between operators and transport authorities should be also simple and have an ability to codify into standards and codes simply. The definition of capabilities helps transport authorities to evaluate the required capability of the private operators and themselves to prevent the challenges before starting to transfer tactical level decisions to private operators.

Keywords

References

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