Chapter 15: Regulation, Organisation and Governance for Sustainable Railways

This chapter reviews railways with respect to their organisation, regulation and ownership, with particular reference to the reforms undertaken in Great Britain in the mid-1990s. First, with respect to organisation, railways constitute a complex industry that has tended to be dominated by integrated monoliths, often organised hierarchically and reliant on governance by command and control. More recently, countries such as Great Britain have experimented with more fragmented, atomistic structures reliant on governance by contract. Second, since their inception, railways have attracted regulation in terms of varying degrees of public control of fares, service quantity and quality, safety and rates of return. More recently, there has been an emphasis on pro-competition policies with respect to open access services (on the tracks competition) and franchising/concessions (off the tracks competition). Third, in terms of ownership, although many railways originated as private companies, a series of nationalisations meant that by the mid-1990s, most were in public ownership, although there have since been a number of privatisations and experiments with public–private partnerships. The focus of these changes has been mainly on the economic performance of the railways, with relatively little emphasis on social and environmental factors. Where sustainability has been considered, it has been mainly terms of determining organisational and financial structures that can last, with the search for such sustainable structures a continuing process.