Connecting Competition and Integration. A Concept of New Organizational Framework for Polish Local Bus Transport

Abstract

At present Polish local bus transport (outside cities) requires radical changes. Up till now solutions based on market deregulation, lack of active transport authorities and a number of operators competing ‘on the road’ have stopped being effective – the decisive factors are rising costs, ever increasing market requirements and related declining incomes. It gives rise to the challenge of joining the existing potential of competing operators to a greater engagement of local authorities which will be forced to finance public service – expanding the transport offer, improvement of quality and subsequently also integration of fares, information and timetables. Another difficulty is that local governments do not possess competences enabling them to create public transport authorities and implement a ‘London’ model, which also succeeds in a number of Polish towns (Wolański, 2008). This paper is dedicated to an attempt to find the optimum solution to the existing problem. It is based on a project carried out at the turn of 2007 and 2008 at the request of Polish Chamber of Road Transport and Forwarding (PIGTSiS), which unites many local bus carriers, mainly deriving from the split of a former state-owned enterprise PKS. The expertise was obtained from a team consisting of: Prof. Olgierd Wyszomirski (head), Krzysztof Grzelec, Ph.D., Hubert Kołodziejski Ph.D., Marcin Gromadzki, Mariusz Józefowicz and Michał Wolański.