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Networked authority and regionalised governance: Public transport, a hierarchy of documents and the anti-hierarchy of authorship

Alexander Paulsson, Karolina Isaksson

This paper is concerned with the authority of written documents and how these artefacts work as governance devices. Networked authority is introduced as a concept to elucidate how documents accumulate formal power in a collaborative process, where several formally independent but informally interdependent organisations together point out the direction of regional public transport planning in the form of one strategic document. Drawing upon recent research on bureaucracy, authority and documents, the paper empirically explores these connections in the context of public transport in Stockholm, Sweden. Based on this case study, authority was found to be accomplished as the written document reproduced an existing hierarchy of documents, through an anti-hierarchical process where the newly formed Regional Public Transport Authority involved several formally independent but informally interdependent organisations, and by lacking a sole author. These three features are crucial for understanding how a collaborative process erodes individuality and personal responsibility, while producing anonymous, networked authority. These results are discussed in relationship to Foucault’s notion of authorship, the author-function, which is derived from legal–institutional networks, much like networked authority. Understanding how networked authority is accomplished through a hierarchy of documents and an anti-hierarchy of authorship contributes with new knowledge on documents and how these work as governance devices in regional governance.

What’s mode got to do with it? Exploring the links between public transport and car access and opportunities for everyday activities among older people

The paper "What’s mode got to do with it? Exploring the links between public transport and car access and opportunities for everyday activities among older people" by K2 researcher Jean Ryan explores the links between modal options and opportunities to participate in everyday activities among people aged 65–79 and living in Sweden’s large metropolitan regions, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. This incorporated a specific focus on those considered at a greater risk of transport-related social exclusion.
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Outcomes from new contracts with “strong” incentives for increasing ridership in bus transport in Stockholm

The Swedish Public Transport Association has adopted recommendations on incentives for increased ridership in tendered contracts, though there is little evidence on how public transport contracts should be designed to reach this goal. This study begins amassing the needed evidence by analyzing the performance of four Stockholm Region bus contracts spanning seven years, examining the new E20 contracts intended to increase ridership, customer satisfaction, and efficiency. These contracts employ 100 percent of payments to operators depending on the number of boarding and paying passengers. Using mostly monthly data, outcomes in E20-contracts in four areas (formerly governed by gross cost contracts) over three years are compared with outcomes in the years before the E20 contracts were implemented, and with two gross contracts running parallel to the E20 contract. Compared with gross cost operators in comparison areas, E20 operators performed better in terms of costs, customer satisfaction (initially worse but then better), punctuality, and canceled departures, but worse in number of departures and no better in number of passengers.
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Evaluation of cost drivers within public bus transports in Sweden

The supply of public transport in Sweden has been continuously increasing and as a consequence thereof, the cost for bus traffic has also increased. However, many indicators show that costs for public transports in Sweden in recent years have increased more than supply. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to test and evaluate the importance of the nine previously identified cost drivers (Camén & Lidestam, 2016) of public bus transports in Sweden. A mixed-method design, which included both focus groups and a questionnaire, was used. The questionnaire, with quantitative rating scales, was sent to representatives from the bus operators and from the Public Transport Authorities (PTAs). In the focus groups, industry associations, consultants, and politicians also participated. The results reveal what the dominating cost factors are, as well as the factors considered to be the most important, according to actors within the Swedish bus transport sector. The most important cost driver identified is peak traffic and the costs of its consequences.
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Influence of public bus transport organisation on the introduction of renewable fuel

The need to decrease emissions from the transport sector is getting urgent and public transport can play an important role in the transition to low emission fuels. To a large extent, public transport in Europe is provided by regional authorities who controls the traffic to a varying degree, from complete public monopoly to competitive tendering. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyse how the organisation of the public bus transport market influences the introduction of renewable fuels. The focus is on understanding what the motivation is for the use of different organisational forms and what challenges and opportunities the authorities in a region encounter during the introduction of renewable fuels. Interviews with authorities in ten Swedish public transport regions show that when functional requirements are used in competitive tendering it will exclusively result in the cheapest renewable fuel available. Thus, if new fuels or technologies should be able to enter the market, either it will be necessary for regional authorities to take more control using specific requirements or publicly management, or the national government must introduce policy instruments that enable new renewable fuels to become competitive on the market.
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Justifying Mega-Projects. An Analysis of the Swedish High-Speed Rail Project

Erik Ronnle, Lund studies in Economics and Management. Lund 2019.

Mega-projects are a growing phenomenon worldwide. More and more projects are started and they grow ever bigger in size. At the same time, there is overwhelming evidence that mega-projects tend to run late,
overrun in terms of costs and fail to deliver the expected benefits. Paradoxically, more and more money is invested in projects that fail to deliver on their promises.
This dissertation analyses how mega-projects are justified through a case study of the Swedish highspeed rail project and the National Negotiation on Housing and Infrastructure (Sverigeförhandlingen). The dissertation finds that the Swedish high-speed rail project is being justified based on a combination of strategies: widening the scope, producing encouraging numbers, creating and mobilising stakeholders, and arguing using a policy narrative. It shows how the project leadership skilfully bypasses criticism from
cost-benefit analysis and succeeds to gather support for the project despite the numbers.

Designing ridership incentives

Kristine Wika Haraldsen and Bård Norheim, 2018

This study is the second part of the larger project Incentives and Evaluation for Improved
Public Transport. The study has been conducted in cooperation with VTI with funding
from K2, Sweden's national centre for research and education on public transport.
Analyses are conducted by Kristine Wika Haraldsen and Bård Norheim. Andreas Vigren
has provided data and contract descriptions and, together with Roger Pyddoke, Karin
Brundell-Freij and Harald Høyem, contributed useful comments.

How to create functioning collaboration in theory and in practice – practical experiences of collaboration when planning public transport systems

The creation of an efficient public transport system increasingly requires collaboration between independent
organizations. Institutional reforms in Europe have created governance situations where collaboration
between organizations is a critical issue, and examples include the integration of transport
and land-use planning and the planning of large public transport projects. The organizational context
of public transport, with several formal, discrete organizations that need to collaborate, raises questions
about how functioning collaborations can be accomplished. This paper examines how to create
functioning collaboration between organizations in the public transport sector. We depart from a theory
of collaboration as a stepwise trust-building process, and we present results from a comparative
case study of collaboration in two Swedish public transport projects. The results show some of the
prerequisites that must be in place in order for the collaboration to work, but also the boundaries of
what collaborative approaches can bring about. Conditions such as honest, open, and inclusive dialog
between stakeholders and resources in the form of finance, knowledge, mandate, and leadership are
important. While there is no guarantee that this will lead to differences in interests being resolved, the
results indicate that it improves the chances of finding compromises that all of the involved stakeholders
can accept, especially if favorable conditions for collaboration are established at an early stage
of the planning process. Building on these findings, we suggest some practical recommendations for
improving collaboration in future public transport projects. These practical recommendations are
aimed at improving the handling of unavoidable conflicts in collaboration in a constructive way.