First Experience with Tendering at the Tactical Level (Service Design) in Dutch Public Transport

This chapter describes how the long awaited competitive tendering of the Dutch public transport has now begun. The first round of tendering showed that transport authorities chose for a wide variety of approached in tendering procedures and contractual clauses. The main question addressed in this paper is whether the legislator’s aims with the enactment of the Passenger Transport Act 2000 are being realized with the current transport authorities’ behavior. One of these aims was to give more service design freedom to the operators in return for a clearer definition of the public transport goals by the authorities. After presenting the reform and its aims in a nutshell, this chapter presents three recent cases of competitive tendering in the Netherlands: Amersfoort, South-Holland DAV and Utrecht-Northwest. These cases were chosen for their diversity in approach and for the role that the tactical level (service design) plays either at the tendering stage or during the contractual period. In the third section, the paper presents a theoretical framework for looking at the evolving institutions in public transport in the Netherlands, and this will help to analyze the possible barriers to the realization of the aims of the new act. This will be detailed in the fourth section, which reports on its own enquiry that attempts to identify the reasons used by authorities in order to make specific choices in favor or against the transfer of tactical freedoms to the operators. After presenting a short outlook on the coming period, the last section of the chapter presents some conclusions.