Competition for and in the passenger rail market: Comparing open access versus franchised train operators' costs and reliability in Britain

Abstract The liberalisation of passenger rail markets across Europe in recent years has focussed not only on competition for the market, but increasingly on competition in the market in the form of entry by open access operators. The possible benefits of such competition in terms of innovation and demand growth must, however, be balanced against concerns regarding possible revenue abstraction and the costs of operating at a small scale. This paper focusses on the latter aspect, comparing the unit costs of open access and franchised operators in Great Britain, and exploring the variation in terms of input price differences and aspects of service provision including train length and service reliability. This paper updates the analysis of Wheat et al. [Transp. Res. A, 113, pp. 114–124, (2018)] incorporating more recent data on open access and franchised intercity operators in Great Britain. In addition, we include new comparisons of punctuality and reliability metrics, and of passenger satisfaction survey results. We find that the unit costs and input prices of both groups are broadly comparable whilst open access operators perform significantly worse in terms of punctuality and cancellations – despite significantly higher passenger satisfaction scores – suggesting that open access operators offer low-cost, low-quality services.