Transit Transformations: Private Financing and Sustainable Urbanism in Hong Kong and Tokyo

Few sectors of urban infrastructure have experienced as strong a push to privatize in recent decades as the public transit sector. In the developed world, spiraling operating deficits and falling ridership prompted many public transit agencies to competitively contract out bus- and rail-passenger services to the private sector in the 1980s and 1990s. As protected monopolies, critics charged that public operators failed to rein in escalating costs, innovate in response to changing market preferences, and effectively compete with the increasingly popular private automobile (Estache 1999). In the United States and United Kingdom, privatization of public transit became the centerpiece of urban transportation policy under the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. In less developed countries, international aid agencies openly embraced urban transport privatization, reflected by the following World Bank policy position: “Competition, facilitated by regulatory reform to enable private firms to enter and exit the market more freely, forces transport suppliers to respond to user’s needs at lower costs” (World Bank 1996: 33).