Transport cost analysis: a case study of the total costs of private and public transport in Auckland [An article from: Environmental Science and Policy]

Transport cost analysis: a case study of the total costs of private and public transport in Auckland [An article from: Environmental Science and Policy] Review

This digital document is a journal article from Environmental Science and Policy, published by Elsevier in . The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
The current level of motorised transportation worldwide is increasingly a social, environmental and economic problem. Transport benefits come alongside injuries and death, unproductive travel time, energy dependence, and environmental damage. One reason for the increasing problem results from externalising various impacts on society. Many of these external - or 'unpaid' - costs have only gradually been recognised and most have either been under-valued or are considered impossible to estimate since they have no value in a market. This research assesses the external (unpaid) and internal (user paid) cost of transport. It focuses on estimating the total cost of both private and public transport, using a case study for Auckland, New Zealand's largest city. The external costs are significant -2.23% of the GDP produced by the 1.2million Auckland region residents in 2001. Of this private transport generated 28 times more external cost than public transport. The internal cost assessment showed that total revenues collected did not even cover 50% of total transport cost. The research has shown that not only are the external costs of vehicle transport high, but that contrary to popular belief the total costs of private transport are subsidised by public transport users. This has implications for successful transport policy options.

Going Private: The International Experience With Transport Privatization

Going Private: The International Experience With Transport Privatization Review

In the last decade many countries turned to private sources to provide services formerly offered by public agencies. Europeans, particularly the British and the French, were leaders in this movement. Developing countries also experimented extensively with privatization in the 1980s, with varying degrees of success. Because governments around the world are heavily involved in transportation, it is a natural focus of privatization experiments and in many ways has been at the cutting edge. Going Private examines the diverse privatization experiences of transportation services and facilities. Cases are drawn from the United States, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Since almost every country has experimented to some degree with highway and bus privatization, the authors focus particularly on these services, although they also discuss urban rail transit and airports. Highways and buses, they explain, encompass all three of the most common and basic forms of privatization: The sale of an existing state-owned enterprise; use of private, rather than public, financing and management for new infrastructure development; and contracting out to private vendors public services previously provided by government employees. After thoroughly examining these services and discussing the motives for, and objections to, privatization, the authors look at the prospects for privatization in other sectors and industries. They assess those circumstances in which privatization is most likely to succeed and those in which it is most likely to fail, for political as well as economic reasons. The authors conclude that privatization involves many political and social as well as economic dimensions. Privatization isusually not simply a matter of efficiency improvements or capital augmentation but also involves such deeply imbedded societal concerns as equity, income transfers, environmental problems, and attitudes toward taxation and the role of government.