Contributors to this issue

Contributors to this issue     

The economics of railway safety

This paper reviews the statistics and economics of railway safety in Great Britain, the European Union and the United States, together with some results for Finland and Japan. In these countries railway safety has improved over recent decades. That finding applies both to train accidents and to personal accidents such as persons struck by trains. Fatal train collisions and derailments command most attention even though they are infrequent and account for only a small minority of railway fatalities. Great Britain, the EU and the USA formally espouse conventional cost benefit analysis for the appraisal of railway safety measures, using the same valuations for the prevention of casualties as are used in road safety appraisal. However there are often strong institutional, legal and political pressures towards adopting railway safety measures with safety benefit: cost ratios well below 1. The best-documented examples of this are automatic train protection systems, which are discussed in the paper. Apart from trespassers, the largest group of railway fatalities occur at level crossings, which the paper also discusses. Level crossing safety measures would seem to be an appropriate subject for cost benefit analysis, but there are few case-studies in the literature. Over the last few decades, the railways in many countries have been privatised or deregulated with the aim of improving their economic performance. Such changes have the potential to affect safety. The paper reviews evidence of the effects on safety of railway restructuring in Great Britain, Japan and the United State, and finds no evidence that safety deteriorated.     

Are urban bus services natural monopolies?

Although Britain's local bus services have been open to free competition for more than three years, most have continued to be operated as monopolies by the original incumbents. Some competition has occurred, but the incumbents have usually driven off entrants. This paper uses findings from case-studies of competition and from deregulation generally to consider whether monopoly operation has inherent advantages over competitive operation. If so, urban bus routes would be natural monopolies. The evidence suggests that they may be, because single-operator services are more convenient for users.     

An analysis of efficiency of the bulk shipping markets

This article discusses the market efficiency of bulk shipping fleets in both the short and long term perspectives. In the short term it demonstrates that shipowners are profit maximizers and that freight rates are equal to marginal cost, that evidencing allocative efficiency of resources. It assumes that the market is differentiated but the intra-marginal substitution takes place. While it is shown that the marginal cost functions of individual vessels, which are aggregated to provide the market supply schedule, are only unique for a specific voyage, provided the general pattern of trade remains more or less constant the supply function is likely to be relatively insensitive to individual changes in ships' MCs. In the long term it is argued that the market is far less efficient with many factors combining to prevent accurate matching of supply and demand for any but for a very short period of time. In recent years supply has exceeded demand by a considerable amount and it is concluded that finance for ships should be provided primarily from shipowners' accumulated reserves and that loan capital should finance a much smaller proportion of the costs of independent tonnage.     

Integrated smartcard solutions: do people want one card for all their services?

Smartcard technologies offer the potential for bringing transport and citizen services onto a single smartcard platform – referred to henceforth as an integrated ‘Transport-Citizen’ (TranCit) card. One question never fully addressed thus far is whether the general public see the integration of services onto a single card as desirable. Based upon research undertaken through the Yorcard project trials, this paper presents the analysis of a series of three focus groups and responses to a public questionnaire which investigated the general desire for multi-application, integrated smartcards. Our findings suggest there is potential for an integrated TranCit card, facilitating easier access to services and travel options across boundaries, even at the international level. A number of operational, technical and data security issues exist which need to be resolved before there would be a greater acceptance of an integrated TranCit card, from both the traveller and the service provider perspective.     

WRC已经没有前途——莫斯利专访

一方面受到斯巴鲁和铃木退出的冲击，另一方面又面临“国际拉力挑战赛”（Intercontinental Rally Challenge）日益增长的威胁，WRC面对的是一个艰难的2009赛季，但是莫斯利却向我们说明什么才是锦标赛的未来，他又怎样使赛事更加稳固并且获得更多的利益。