[sustran] Re: Private Sector Involvement in Public Transport Infrastructure?

John Ernst itdpasia at adelphia.net
Thu Mar 30 07:07:07 JST 2006


Dear Joshua,

An interesting item to look at in Asia at the moment are the 
proliferation of monorail proposals from the private sector.  These 
are usually made by consortiums of European (e.g., UK, Switzerland) 
and Asian (e.g., Japan, Malaysia) companies.

The Delhi Metro Rail Company is also worth looking at.  Other persons 
on this list could provide more details about the private/government 
nature of this company.  They have taken to promoting rail projects 
in cities throughout India.  (Proposals for private sector investment 
in both rail and monorail systems were a primary factor in 
Hyderabad's decision to postpone building a BRT system.)

Most of the above are in proposal stages only.  The Jakarta monorail 
is an interesting case in that it has entered construction stage.  As 
is typical for these projects, the financial analysis is highly 
questionable, with demand overstated and costs understated.  The 
project has been technically under construction for almost 2-years 
now (there are some half constructed pillars on parts of the 
route).  Despite initial promises the companies involved have 
repeatedly come back to the city asking for financial subsidies of 
various kinds.

You can get an overview of the players and events by searching the 
archives of the Jakarta Post www.thejakartapost.com .  But to find 
the real story would take more digging.  ITDP has a reasonable public 
transport demand model for Jakarta based on 40,000 on-board O-D 
surveys conducted with the University of Indonesia Center for 
Transportation Studies.  This would be available if you wanted to run 
your own demand projections for the project.

I hope this is useful.  Please give my regards to your advisor.

Best,
John


At 08:56 AM 3/29/2006, Joshua Nelson wrote:
>All,
>
>I'm a graduate student at MIT working with Professor Chris Zegras.  We're
>updating a module from GTZ about private participation in urban transport
>infrastructure.  In the update we would like to include examples of privately
>funded public transport infrastructure projects in Asia, especially China.  We
>are aware of the BTS SkyTrain in Bangkok, but would like to broaden 
>our scope.
>If anyone has knowledge of any additional private sector public transport
>infrastructure projects in Asia or could point us toward colleagues who may
>have information to share, it would be much appreciated.
>
>As an aside, we are also looking for specific information to update 
>a section in
>the module on private road infrastructure projects in Bangkok.  This 
>section is
>current up to the year 2000; developments since then are of much interest.
>
>Thank you for your assistance.
>
>Sincerely,
>Joshua Nelson
>Candidate, Master in City Planning
>Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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John Ernst   -  Director, Asia Region
    ITDP - The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy
Promoting environmentally sustainable and equitable transportation worldwide
  Visit http://www.itdp.org
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