Speaker
Description
Longstanding institutional fragmentation of public transport services leads to service gaps, poor coordination and discourages ridership. The current conversations about service adaptation are shining a light on long-standing transport institutional challenges like fragmentation, inconsistent fare structures & financing and lack of coverage. In many cities, there are multiple operators, private and public, multiple cities, counties, tendering agreements and funding systems in place. Governance shapes the frequency of transfers and their difficulty, affecting ridership (Miller et al., 2005; Walker, 2012). This includes the existence and ease of cross-operator ticketing (Buehler et al., 2017), schedule coordination, terminal and app sharing, and data coordination (Rivasplata, 2012).
This paper examines cases in Europe and the US chosen to represent different transit governance models, and conducts in-depth qualitative interview and document analysis to identify how the level of government at which public transport is funded impacts transit agencies’ ability to coordinate services. This paper looks at two metro regions in Europe and two in the US, with one region on each continent being locally governed & funded and one region governed and funded at a higher level of government (e.g. regional, federal state, or national). For each case, we interview agency CEOS or staff responsible for service planning to understand how their funding and governance structure help or hinder their ability to coordinate services.
We also examine a combination of annual reports, policy documents, tax collection information, fare policies and interagency agreements/ MOUs, in order to understand the link between governance and service outcomes like coverage and trip time to work. The interviews highlight the challenges of integrating services under each governance model, focusing especially on the degree of local autonomy in decision making. We focus in particular on how funding sources supporting public transport affect interagency agreements; coordination of tickets, schedules and routes. This work adds detail to the literature of transport governance, building off of previous literature documenting the range of regional transport governing structures (Weinreich & Skuzinski, 2021), measuring levels of fragmention (Skuzinski et al., 2022 & 2023), and studying how governing structures developed over time (Weinreich & Bonakdar, 2020).
Findings focus on the role of higher levels of government in helping support services (or hinder them), the power that local transit agencies have to improve service or barriers to doing this, and formal or informal institutions local transit agencies have created to coordinate services independent of higher levels of government.
References
Transportation, Fragmentation, Governance, Collaboration, Institutional Adaptation
| Keywords | Transportation, Fragmentation, Governance, Collaboration, Institutional Adaptation |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
