Presentation to London Assembly delegation

Picture at right from left to right: John Miller, Jenny Jones, Dan Irvin, Jonathan Richmond, Yossi Sheffi, Lynne Featherstone, Roger Evans, Fred Salvucci, John Biggs.

I invited an all-party delegation (John Biggs, Labour; Roger Evans, Conservative; Lynne Featherstone, Liberal Democrat; and Jenny Jones, Green) of the London Assembly, visiting the US to learn about transit operations and financing, to include Boston in their itinerary for a series of briefings from local experts, which I arranged. Yossi Sheffi, Director of the MIT Center for Transportation Studies, welcomed the guests to the event, held at MIT on March 1, 2001.

John Biggs, Chair, London Assembly Transport Operations Scrutiny Committee, and Lynne Featherstone, Chair, London Assembly Transport Policy and Spatial Development Committee, gave statements on the current transport problems facing London, which are focused on the urgent needs for infrastructure renewal and service quality improvements on the Underground, and a requirement to decide whether to move forward on these tasks through a privatized approach or with continued public sector control, using bond financing for the necessary capital expenditures.

I gave a presentation of my new book, The Private Provision of Public Transport. The picture on the page which brought you here, (taken by and copyright Jacqueline Yen of The Tech), shows me describing privatized bus operations in Las Vegas, the most successful case of bus privatization studied in my book.

MIT Professor John Miller addressed the delegation on “Practical and Competitive Contract Strategies for Infrastructure Collections.”

Dan Irvin, Managing Director, New England Public Finance Group, PaineWebber, gave an “Overview of US Public Infrastructure Finance.”

MIT Senior Lecturer and former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation, Fred Salvucci, talked about “Competition in Public Transport in Boston, Buenos Aires, and San Juan, Puerto Rico.”