Effect Of Urban Decentralization Upon Transit Operation And Policies

An examination of the relationship between mass transit and decentralization of population and employment in urban areas of the United States with case studies of Boston, Rochester, San Jose and Tampa. Policy recommendations are included.

This dissertation, "The Effects of Privatization, Deregulation and Decentralization on the Efficient Operation of Urban Mass Transit Railways" by Priyanka, Jain, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. DOI: 10.5353/th_b3862865 Subjects: Subways - Deregulation Privatization Subways - Economic aspects

Cities and towns are vital for the development of economic systems and social organisations. However, cities face tremendous challenges. They have to simultaneously attract business, provide a good livelihood for their inhabitants, generate enough resources to finance infrastructure and social needs, and take care of their poor. The Challenge of Urban Government: Policies and Practices looks at the consequences of globalisation on city management. This book focuses on the complex of issues generated in urban areas, such as the dynamics of metropolitan spaces, and the need to define strategic territory for operational and policy purposes. Some urgent challenges include how to handle spillovers across municipalities and the need to create a new city structure over an existing city to give the suburbs some elements of centrality. It examines the dynamics of governance and how to get stakeholders' participation in the government process.

Financing public transport through public funds is a common practice that can be justified on different grounds: equity, natural monopoly and, particularly with the increasing motorization rate, externalities produced by private transport (congestion, pollution, road accidents) especially in urban areas. In addition, there is a belief that transport investments support economic growth, in particular transit investments because they help fostering the agglomeration effect. Whether local or national tax sources should be used for subsidizing public transport is a fairly recent question, at least in Europe where, historically, countries used to be very centralized. Several national policy reviews as well as academic papers suggest that the reforms aiming at decentralizing power and responsibility for urban public transport management lead to successful outcomes. Yet, there is no literature on the effects of decentralization of tax raising on public transport provision although an increasing number of subnational governments reports a mismatch between transferred resources and devolved responsibilities and the public finance literature indicates that decentralization of finance authority can improve the results of decentralization reforms.

An expansion of the 1979 edition, which covered 1941-56, examining the recent shift of power in the politics of the interstate-and-defense system, from the national to the local level, and from scientific to political elites. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR