Some thoughts on competitive tendering in local bus operations

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Abstract
Competitive tendering has become an established mechanism for introducing competitive forces into an essentially regulated market for the supply of local bus services. Although the notion of tendering is not new, the imposition of a centralized approach to tendering on a planned release of selected routes and area networks does represent a changed approach. In this paper I discuss some of the theoretical and practical aspects of competitive tendering, and suggest that a real threat to effective tendering is both the emergence of sufficient competition and the administrative difficulty of implementation.