European Transport / Trasporti Europei (1998) 08/09

This research focuses on Great Britain’s experience with deregulation of urban bus transit services. In the first part of this study the market organisation after deregulation is examined. The article discusses the causes that, after ten years of deregulation, permit the author to declare that the "social" market is a competitive and contestable market while the "commercial" market doesn’t present these characteristics. The second part of the article presents the effects of deregulation on producers, Governement and consumers. Service providers’ operating costs fell much more sharply than the opponents of deregulation expected. The British Government emerged as a clear winner, with reduced bus transit subsidies. Real fares and service instability rose for the consumers. As a result patronage fell drastically with deregulation.

Traffic flows are no longer appropriate indicators for ports impact on local economies: containerisation, footloose industries, growing port competition, surplus transfer from ports to MTOs, cause gaps between port performances and local benefits. These changes witness a vertical and horizontal integration turning into a global market structure, where returns on port investments may well be lost locally. While growing external costs suggest concerns about "sustainable ports" for general and local economic systems. An economic-territorial trade-off is needed, where benefits and costs are optimised at all scales, and each local system decides its level of involvement in port facilities.

In the last years the containerized maritime freight transport has significantly increased. The phenomenon had also interested Italy, through dominant roles assumed by Gioia Tauro and Genova harbours, but also through the revival of many other harbours. A rearrangement of the international system is in progress and seems to assign to national and Mediterranean portuality new opportunities of development. In this paper the attention is addressed to the analysis of the maritime transport costs faced by a transport operator (shipowner, charterer, liner). The transportation of containerized freights depends on the generalized cost, which results from the sum of monetary costs, taxes, travel times, waiting and intermodal exchange times, guarantees in terms of respect of the scheduled programs and service reliability. The model calibration presented is based upon data referred to single ships, which carry out a feeder service in the Mediterranean basin. They have been opportunely organized and elaborated in order to define the structure of a complete model, which can be an useful tool for scenario evaluations.

Standardisation is actually one of the most important factor to improve company performance, for every branch of industry, to define functional features of a product and interchanging protocols with other systems. This report describes the standard adopted by European Committee for Standardisation for the Reference Data Model for Public Transport (TRANSMODEL) and its implementation by the Trieste transit company ACT. TRANSMODEL, describing the data of interest to public transport companies in a standard way, will considerably facilitate the design of integrated information handling systems in the public transport domain. This standard is open to any hardware platform. ACT is the first Italian transit company that have chosen TRANSMODEL like a backbone for his company-wide information system renewal.