Dyears a column published on January 2 by The world250 elected officials from the Ile-de-France asked Elisabeth Borne to postpone Valérie Pécresse’s decision to “privatize the bus transport system in the Ile-de-France region” so that alternative solutions can be explored.
If a public debate must be organised, it still has to be properly posed. Too often, choices in terms of the organization of services of general interest are presented by opposing a model of public service, presumed to be virtuous in itself, to a model of competition, presumed to be wild, between private operators.
To put it simply, four types of stakeholders are concerned: transport operators, infrastructure managers (traffic routes, stations, etc.), users, and public authorities.
To claim that there are only two models for organizing relations between all these actors is oversimplifying, even simplistic, and obscures the terms of the debate.
Organizers and funders
Mobility having many collective impacts (pollution, congestion, use of the public domain) and alternative modes of transport being both complementary and competing, public authorities are always, in the last resort, the organizers and financiers of transport systems. They then intervene to guide investments, grant operating licenses, supervise the behavior of actors, etc.
Competitive bidding at the time of calls for tenders makes it possible to compare operators’ proposals. What is expected is more transparency, more data and potentially better value for money for the user.
Far from the rhetoric on the dismantling of the public service, the objective of the call for competition is therefore to allow the public authorities and, beyond that, all the economic and social actors, to have the information necessary to assess the conditions for achieving the general interest.
It is in the same spirit that we operate a separation of the management of infrastructures from that of services. This is to ensure that the former are optimized to meet the needs of different operators and managed in such a way as to allow fair access to service providers, themselves in competition.
Full knowledge of costs and benefits
In practice, the implementation of these principles proves to be complex as it involves organizing the physical, informational and pricing conditions for access to a large number of infrastructure elements and organizing the interfaces between services. various transportation. Vigilance is required to ensure the right balance between gains related to transparency and the costs of managing these multiple interfaces.
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