European Transport / Trasporti Europei (2007) 36/XII

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CONTENTS

Special issue: Pricing, Financing and Investment in Transport
Editors: André De Palma, Edoardo Marcucci, E. Niskanen, Erik Verhoef

André De Palma, Edoardo Marcucci, E. Niskanen, Erik Verhoef
Introduction

Souhir Abbes
Marginal social cost pricing in European seaports

Paolo Beria
Transport megaprojects in Italy. A comparative analysis of economic feasibility studies into EIAs

André de Palma, Kiarash Motamedi, Nathalie Picard, Paul Waddell
Accessibility and environmental quality: inequality in the Paris housing market

Emmanuel Doumas
Diversification activities of passenger railway companies

Edoardo Marcucci, Valerio Gatta
Quality and public transport service contracts

José Meléndez-Hidalgo, Piet Rietveld, Erik Verhoef
On the change in surpluses equivalence: measuring benefits from transport infrastructure investments

 

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  • Publication
    On the change in surpluses equivalence: measuring benefits from transport infrastructure investments
    (EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2007)
    Meléndez-Hidalgo, José
    ;
    Rietveld, Piet
    ;
    Verhoef, Erik
    Reductions in transport costs resulting from infrastructure improvements generate benefits that can be measured as surplus changes either at an economy-wide scale (social welfare changes) or, as is common practice in cost-benefit analysis (CBA), at a transport market level as transport users’ surplus changes. In this paper we look at an economy with spatially separated markets embedded in a transport network (a spatial price equilibrium model) to study the equivalence between these two benefit measures. Three different product market competition arrangements are considered. A similar question and strategy is presented in Jara-Díaz (1986) employing a two-node network and extreme competition assumptions on the production side: perfect competition and monopolistic production with arbitrage. We extend his work by additionally considering perfect collusion (monopoly without resale) and Cournot-Nash oligopoly under flow-dependent transport costs (i.e. congestion in transport). Numerical simulations in a three-node network with and without transshipment nodes, illustrate our main results.
      1065  1227
  • Publication
    Quality and public transport service contracts
    (EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2007)
    Gatta, Valerio
    ;
    Marcucci, Edoardo
    Service contracts are the natural method to set bilateral commitments. In transport service context, public authorities and transport operators have different goals, therefore regulation plays an important role especially failing competition. After a brief description of the most important regulatory procedures, we focus our attention on the quality framework in service contracts. In recent years the inclusion of quality requirements in contracts is becoming common practice, especially when adopting price cap regulation. This paper suggests a criterion for service quality definition, measurement and integration in contracts for the production of socially valuable transport services. Using choice-based conjoint analysis to analyse customer preferences we estimate the passengers’ evaluation of different service features and calculate a robust specification of a service quality index from the customers’ point of view. A case study demonstrates the procedure to follow for measuring service quality in local public transport differentiated by geographical service segments.
      1816  2235
  • Publication
    Diversification activities of passenger railway companies
    (EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2007)
    Doumas, Emmanuel
    This paper is about diversification activities, and, more accurately, activities of capitalization of the land and commercial rent generated by railway infrastructures, of passenger railway companies. The global situation of these activities in the different parts of the world in 2003-2004 is first described. Then, the evolution of these activities during the period 1990-2004 is studied. A convergence towards a common diversification strategy and towards activities in stations is observed. Some consequences of the existence of this convergence in terms of transport policies are discussed.
      965  2755
  • Publication
    Accessibility and environmental quality: inequality in the Paris housing market
    (EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2007)
    De Palma, André
    ;
    Motamedi, Kiarash
    ;
    Picard, Nathalie
    ;
    Waddell, Paul
    In this paper we examine empirically the market for local amenities in the Paris metropolitan region. We find first that there is considerable inequality in the spatial distribution of these local amenities, including accessibility, environmental and social indicators. We use a spatial representation and Lorenz curves to examine the degree of inequality in these amenities, and this provides evidence that some amenities (or disamenities) are much more inequitably distributed than others. The most extremely unequally distributed amenities are noise (due to its concentration near airports), “Redevelopment Areas”, presence of water (lakes and rivers) and forests, and presence of train and subway stations. Some indicators, such as the “Poulit accessibility” measure, were by contrast remarkably constant over the region. We recognize that local amenities should be capitalized into the housing market, and explore the willingness to pay of households for these amenities within the Paris region using alternative specifications of a location choice model. One of the core questions we examine is the spatial scale of the amenity effects and how this is captured in a location choice context. By estimating models at both a commune and at a grid cell level, we obtain new insights into how households in the Paris region trade off amenities against each other and against housing cost. We find that the residential location choice model fits the data moderately better at the smaller scale of the grid cell compared to the commune.
      1665  1727
  • Publication
    Transport megaprojects in Italy. A comparative analysis of economic feasibility studies into EIAs.
    (EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2007)
    Beria, Paolo
    The paper presents a survey conducted on the environmental impact assessments and the feasibility studies for fifteen selected infrastructural transport projects all over the Italian territory and approved under the so called “Objective Law”. The survey collects data concerning the demand forecasts, the definition of alternatives and the cost benefit analysis, with their level of detail. The aim of such work is to derive some general considerations about the quality, the transparency and the contents of the assessment, in the context of the Italian normative framework. For the analysed projects, it is possible to recognise a lack of contemplation to the definition and in the construction of the demand forecast model, the use of extremely standardised schemes of comparison, the presence of double counting and some theoretical errors concerning costs evaluation. Moreover, the parallel analysis of different projects on the same study-area shows, in some cases, the absence of any coordination among projects, as well as different outputs from the transport demand forecast model; this creates problems in validating and comparing the results of each analysis. After an introduction to the normative framework, the adopted methodology is presented. After that, the paper – reflecting study objectives – includes first, an analysis of alternatives definition and tools used for the decision support system; second, the discussion and comparison of the demand forecasts quality; third, the approach used for the quantitative economic assessment. Then, as example, the standardised railways operator procedure has been analysed and commented. Finally some conclusions will be drawn.
      1183  2533