Governing spaces: urban transit, land development and the local state

Abstract:

In New Zealand and in the UK, policymakers have assumed that public transport operators are in a similar position to the operators of trucks, taxis, airlines and shipping. As such, a philosophy of commercialisation has been applied to bus operations. In practice, transit commercialisation has been disastrous. A large part of the problem is that transit operations do not compete with each other so much as with the automobile. As such, the agency which has the most incentive and ability to attract new customers to transit is not the operator but rather the city or, to be more precise, the 'local state'. It is up to the local state to organise 'loss leader' transit services on priority routes, which will facilitate more intensive land development and eventually pay for themselves through higher rates. Transit commercialisation permits the local state to evade its development responsibilities and forces operators themselves into a defensive mode, reliant on inelastic, 'captive' customers and employing market strategies such as non-transferable tickets to retain their share of a small and perhaps shrinking pie.

Keywords: complexity; governance; local state; transport

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1080/10286600802002940

Affiliations: 1: North Shore City Council, Auckland, New Zealand 1