Designing transit concession contracts to deal with uncertainty

This thesis proposes a performance regime structure for public transit concession contracts, designed so incentives to the concessionaire can be effective given significant uncertainty about the future operating conditions. This is intended to aid agencies in designing regimes that will encourage continually improving performance through the use of relevant and adaptive incentives. The proposed incentives are adjusted annually based on actual circumstances. An adaptive regime can also allow the incentives to be more cost and resource efficient and is especially well-suited to so-called "gross-cost" contracts when the public agency retains the fare revenue and absorbs the revenue risk for the services. The motivation for this research is the anticipated transfer of the oversight responsibilities for the Silverlink Metro regional rail services, in outer London, from the UK Department for Transport to Transport for London. This new service will undergo substantial infrastructure and service upgrades in the next several years and an innovative operating contract is required to maintain and improve service levels during this transitional period. The Proposed performance regime is composed of two major components: 1. A "bundled" set of specific performance measures based on which the concessionaire can earn annual bonuses or incur penalties based on a set of adaptive targets; and 2. An excess revenue and/or ridership incentive which is designed to capture all of the intangible actions that a concessionaire can bring to bear to produce more effective service.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Blakey, Tara Naomi Chin

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Nigel H. M. Wilson.

• Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/47765

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/47765