IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/halshs-01372609.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Extension of the high speed rail network in France: Facing the curse that affects PPPs in the rail sector

Author

Listed:
  • Yves Crozet

    (LET - Laboratoire d'économie des transports - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - ENTPE - École Nationale des Travaux Publics de l'État - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

A large number of public-private partnerships (PPPs) have been awarded in the rail sector during recent decades. A review of rail PPPs over the last 30 years shows that some of them have failed, almost as though there was a curse on railway PPPs. Despite the evidence of risks associated with PPPs in the rail sector, the publicly owned French rail infrastructure manager (RFF) launched two major PPPs and a very large concession between 2010 and 2012. This decision was taken at the request of the government which made extending the network of High Speed Lines (HSLs) the cornerstone of its rail policy. After a description of the curse affecting some rail sector PPPs, the paper proposes a detailed presentation of the main on-going HSR projects in France. The aim of the paper is to explain how RFF and the French public authorities have tried to face the risks that affects rail sector PPPs. Why the government did recommend a concession for the biggest project and PPPs (in the strict sense of the term) for the other two? What are the main risks that remain for the public authorities when large projects face difficulties? The state is very often the lender of last resort but also the operator of last resort because it is usually highly unacceptable to simply close the service down. The paper also considers another major source of risk – the fact that public decision-makers behave like "risk lovers". In this way they provide their private sector partners with margins for manoeuvre that encourage opportunistic behaviours. In order to protect itself from the principal risk the state must first protect itself from itself!

Suggested Citation

  • Yves Crozet, 2014. "Extension of the high speed rail network in France: Facing the curse that affects PPPs in the rail sector," Post-Print halshs-01372609, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-01372609
    DOI: 10.1016/j.retrec.2014.09.065
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Martín, Belén & Ortega, Emilio & de Isidro, Ágata & Iglesias-Merchan, Carlos, 2021. "Improvements in high-speed rail network environmental evaluation and planning: An assessment of accessibility gains and landscape connectivity costs in Spain," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    2. Yu Zang & Wei Shangguan & Baigen Cai & Huashen Wang & Michael G Pecht, 2019. "Methods for fault diagnosis of high-speed railways: A review," Journal of Risk and Reliability, , vol. 233(5), pages 908-922, October.
    3. Beria, Paolo & Grimaldi, Raffaele & Albalate, Daniel & Bel, Germà, 2018. "Delusions of success: Costs and demand of high-speed rail in Italy and Spain," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 68(C), pages 63-79.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-01372609. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.