Thredbo 14 Conference

14th International Conference on Competition and Ownership in Land Passenger Transport 

Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Santiago, Chile 

Sunday 30 August to
Thursday 3 September 2015
 

The Thredbo Series serves as a forum for the international community, integrating a mix of executives from public agencies, and operating and consulting companies with researchers and academics in a unique and lively discussion. The conference includes academic developments, case studies, and benchmark experiences, with participants from every continent. Unlike most scientific conferences, Thredbo is structured around workshops with delegates choosing a workshop which they stay with for the duration. In each workshop, there is a deep discussion around a relevant question that later forms the basis of a report which is shared in a plenary presentation and then published in special journal edition. This structure allows everyone attending Thredbo not only to hear interesting viewpoints but also to be actively involved in the discussion.

We are sure that the conference will capture the attention of researchers worldwide; we expect to receive over one hundred contributions that will be allocated across eight exciting workshops. It will be a very lively and exciting week that you should not miss.
 

Call for Abstracts

The call for abstracts for the Thredbo 14 Conference is now open; it will close on Friday 12 December 2014.

The conference will review the latest international developments in competition and ownership in land passenger transport, with reference to key political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental trends. The primary focus is on public transport, however, the conference also looks at important linkages between public transport and other sectors, in areas such as planning, policy, contracting, financing and funding. This includes the role of reforms in road pricing and of other policy instruments to discourage car use as part of an integrated package to grow demand for public transport. The conference series is intended to be inclusive with coverage of both developed and developing markets and of both formal and informal transport. A mark of its successful continuity as a series over 26 years has been the mix of key stakeholders sharing their experience, especially operators, regulators and government officials, as well as academics.

Papers are invited that address one of the following eight workshop themes of the conference. Please note that Thredbo is an interactive workshop-based conference series and delegates remain with their workshop throughout the conference in order to contribute to the evolving debate and discussion.

Workshop 1. Innovations in service delivery and performance management

Chair: Professor Graham Currie
Rapporteur: Dr Rico Merkert

This workshop covers new management tools and technologies available to both operators and regulators to improve customer service. It includes a discussion of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in contracts (including monitoring regimes) and consideration of performance incentives for growing patronage, improving reliability, reducing overcrowding and improving other aspects of service quality.

Workshop 2. Effective institutional relationships, regulatory frameworks and contract transition strategies

Chair: Associate Professor Wijnand Veeneman
Rapporteur: Dr Andrew Smith

This workshop will build on Workshop 5 from Thredbo 13, examining the roles and responsibilities of government, operators (including infrastructure managers) and third parties focusing on improving institutional relationships. It will address how to develop and improve regulatory frameworks, including in cases with limited public sector institutional capacity. We welcome research on improving organizational capacity for both regulators and firms. This workshop will continue to review experiences with different models for public transport provision with a particular focus on those initiated by authorities. It will examine developments in contracting, licensing provisions, economic regulation and the role of incentives to encourage high quality provision. There has been growing interest in the transition costs of change at a variety of levels from regime change to the change of operators within a contracting regime. It is hoped that this workshop will provide new evidence on disruption costs and on how these costs might be reduced.

Workshop 3. Sustainable funding sources, and related cost/benefit measurements, for public transport

Chair: Adjunct Professor John Stanley
Rapporteur: Professor David Levinson

The issue of paying for public transit is perennial. This workshop will focus on sustainable funding, both in the sense of funding that is reliable over time, and also that advances sustainability goals for transportation. We welcome papers that propose or evaluate new or refined methods to measure the costs and benefits of public transit and how these measures can be monetized to assist with system/service funding.

Workshop 4. Developing inter-modal transport systems

Chair: Professor Stephen Ison
Rapporteur: Lake Sagaris

Public transport systems have been slow to address the dilemmas inherent in making their systems comfortable, direct, reliable and door-to-door, all key characteristics of "automobility", the socio-technological phenomenon they seek to replace. Yet the future of public transport requires truly intermodal systems, with appropriate land use decisions and seamless transfers between the mode appropriate for a specific traveller, trip type, purpose or distance. Intermodal transport requires planning public space to optimize walkability and cycle-inclusion, which involves private bicycles, bike-share, bicycle rickshaws, clean-running (usually electric or CNG) two- and three-wheelers, shared taxis and car sharing, in addition to traditional modes of public transit. It also requires different scales of governance and private operation, including micro and small businesses, cooperatives and other business models. Different owners and operators of specific modes can foster or limit the development and cooperation needed for multi-modal planning and intermodal service delivery. This workshop will examine the social, political, institutional, regulatory, and operational challenges to providing inter-modal transport. Is current thinking about "social sustainability" and transport sufficient? What are our definitions of "sustainability" missing, when it comes to scale, inclusion, health, resilience?

Workshop 5. Harnessing big data

Chair: Associate Professor Marcela Munizaga
Rapporteur: Professor Haris Koutsopoulos

We are facing the new availability of multiple data sources, automatically generated as side products of the operation the public transport system (automatic fare collection, automatic vehicle location, automatic passenger counting) and also from technological devices external to the public transport system (mobile phone, private GPS, Bluetooth). These data sources can be used to help both agencies and operators better track performance and passenger behaviour, and understand the market and needs of trip-makers. This workshop will cover both applications and challenges of using these large datasets offline and in real time in order to improve service. We also welcome papers addressing the regulatory and access issues of data and the relationship between open data and competition.

Workshop 6. Reassessing public operations

Chair: Dr Laurel Paget-Seekins
Rapporteur: Professor Jackie Walters

This workshop will revisit the question of whether to contract or publicly operate urban transit services, particularly within the context of the transition to formalized services in developing cities. This transition generates a range of issues from operational challenges to institutional capacity and political obstacles that impact the decision and the outcome of the ownership of operations question. We hope to generate a body of research that will help decision-makers to make whether to contract or publicly operate a deliberate policy decision. We welcome papers that discuss the complexities of formalization and how they impact the ownership of operations question, and evaluations of existing contracted or publicly operated services.

Workshop 7. Market initiative: regulatory design, implementation and performance

Chair: Professor John Preston
Rapporteur: Didier van de Velde

This workshop will build on Workshop 4 from Thredbo 13, discussing the current functioning and regulatory options for regimes where autonomous market-initiative plays a role (i.e., initiatives that do not result from competitive tendering). This could be the main institutional feature (deregulated regime) but it could also be hybrid regimes where market-initiative constitutes a marginal or additional feature to market organised by contracting/tendering (e.g., limited exclusivity of the main transport contract, complementary chain services with shared ride or shared vehicles, local community initiatives in addition to regular public transport, interactions with commercial long-distance services, etc). The workshop will cover all modes (bus, coach and rail) and both local and long-distance markets. Authors are requested to provide case studies of both good and bad practices to enlighten this debate, addressing in particular: the issue of coordination between services (is it needed or not? does regulation lead to improved performance?), performance of hybrid regimes, issues of concentration and competition, regulatory skills required for success, and balance between regulatory guidance through prohibition and guidance through financial and other incentives.

Workshop 8. The wider economic, social and environmental impacts of public transport investment

Chair: Professor Corinne Mulley
Rapporteur: Glen Weisbrod

This workshop will look at how countries (both developed and developing) now consider wider land use, social inclusion, environmental, and agglomeration issues and how these and the economic impacts of new infrastructure can be used to complement cost benefit decisions on public transport investment. On the one hand, developing countries are in many cases rapidly moving to a dominance of car-based passenger transport as a result of growing incomes and lack of collective transport alternatives. On the other hand, developed countries are now looking to reduce car dominance and increase the use of public transport and active transport as a measure to improve wellbeing and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This workshop will seek to understand the broader context of these trends and their impact on externalities such as social inclusion, equity, housing, employment and the environment, as well as considering how these trends impact on the economy in question and on the decision as to what public transport investment regime to implement.

Abstract Submission

All abstracts are to be submitted via the online submission process hosted by EasyChair:

To submit your abstract you will need to have a (free) account with EasyChair.

If you have an EasyChair account

Please use the link above to login to your account, click on the New Submission tab and then carefully follow the steps on that page to submit your abstract. Once you submit your abstract you will receive an email acknowledging receipt of the abstract, as will your co-authors.

If you do not have an EasyChair account

Please click on create an account at the link above and follow the steps indicated. You will receive an email to the email address you have registered  with a link to activate your account. You will then need to complete a few more details online and your account will then be created. You will then be provided with this option: “To log in for Thredbo 14 click here”. Please login and then click on the New Submission tab (top left of the page), review and agree to the Terms of Service, click on theNew Submission tab again and then carefully follow the steps on that page to submit your abstract. Once you submit your abstract you will receive an email acknowledging receipt of the abstract, as will your co-authors.

If you have technical difficulties during the submission process there is a Help option in every EasyChair screen (top right of the page).

For any other questions about the Call for Abstracts please email:

Thredbo 13
Conference Proceedings

A selection of papers from the Thredbo 13 Conference will be published in November 2014 as Volume 47 of the Research in Transportation Economicsjournal (Elsevier).

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