Austerity in public transport in Europe: the influence of governance

The financial crisis has put pressure on government budgets across Europe. The expectation is that this also has affected public transport budgets in metropolitan areas. This article looks at five cases of metropolitan public transport to see to what extent this is the case. Multi-level governance and fiscal federalism explain the rather surprising outcome. This article is aimed to be a first step into a better understanding of the effect of governance in public transport in a broad sense. It develops the understanding of how the organizational context influences those funding decisions and the related outcome in terms of public transport services provided and passengers transported. The article shows that the effect of budget pressure was varied over the five cases depending on governance in those cases and overall can be characterized as limited. Funding and supply generally kept growing, despite the pressure put on budgets by the financial crisis

Review on the Infomobility Quality - A new framework

Infomobility systems are spreading across the world, attracting the attention of policy-makers and practitioners from a variety of industries. However, several studies have asserted that they not always are effective in improving transport systems, since they do not convey the required information to mobility managers and customers. On the basis of existing academic contributions in the transport information quality and information quality literature, this study addresses the concept of Infomobility Quality, proposing a comprehensive framework that encompasses the main quality dimensions to be considered in the design and assessment of the quality and potential effectiveness of the Infomobility system. This study aims to fill a literature gap and to provide transport system decision-makers with an instrument to develop and improve Infomobility systems

Infomobility: a holistic framework for a literature review

In recent years, infomobility started to be considered a key instrument in relation to sustainable mobility. Infomobility has a potential to decrease environmental, social and economic transportation costs, gathering a wide range of information about mobility dynamics that can increase users' awareness and improve the management of the mobility system. However, from an academic point of view, there is a high confusion about this term due to the high fragmentation and heterogeneity of the literature. To provide a possible answer to this problem, this article aims to perform a literature review of the concept of infomobility, proposing a reference framework to go through existing contributions. The framework encompasses four main dimensions of infomobility: value chain, application areas, technologies and actors. Based on this review, the authors highlight the existence of overlapping areas among the elements of the framework and discuss criticalities and potentialities of infomobility

Austerity in public transport in Europe: The influence of governance

International audienceThe financial crisis has put pressure on government budgets across Europe. The expectation is that this also has affected public transport budgets in metropolitan areas. This article looks at five cases of metropolitan public transport to see to what extent this is the case. Multi-level governance and fiscal federalism explain the rather surprising outcome.This article is aimed to be a first step into a better understanding of the effect of governance in public transport in a broad sense. It develops the understanding of how the organizational context influences those funding decisions and the related outcome in terms of public transport services provided and passengers transported.The article shows that the effect of budget pressure was varied over the five cases depending on governance in those cases and overall can be characterized as limited. Funding and supply generally kept growing, despite the pressure put on budgets by the financial crisis