Coopetition between commercial and subsidized railway services – the case of the greater Stockholm region

Abstract

An important ingredient of the deregulation of the Swedish railway system is the increased involvement of public actors on the local and regional level in the provision of railway services. The subsidized local and regional railway services show the strongest growth of all market segments in the Swedish passenger railway market. The strong growth is due both to changes in travel patterns and improved subsidized railway services. One important factor in the success of the regional public transport authorities’ (PTA) railway services is the redefinition of the scope of these railway services by expanding existing regional networks into neighbouring counties and by interconnecting regional railway networks into bigger entities. In 2016 nearly all local and regional railway services in Sweden’s most populated region, Mälardalen, became part of a network of railway services subsidized by the PTAs in the greater region. In this paper we will analyse the cooperative and competitive interactions between the stakeholders in the greater region using the key concepts in the theory of hybrid organizations. We find that despite moving towards a unified public transport market covering many counties the hybrid organizations use different governance structures and have different goal structures and principles for sharing value creation.