Bus transport in Buenos Aires. Paradoxical experiences to 10 years of revision

GUTIERREZ, ANDREA INÉS

Lisboa

Conferencia; Competition and Ownership in Land Passanger Transport; 2005

Instituto Superior Técnico de Lisboa

Buenos Aires offers a singular mix of situations that outline it as an interesting case for the evidence capture. The public bus transport of Buenos Aires leaked out internationally by its high level of service, cover and efficacy under conditions of indirect management in multi property situation and absence of subvention. It also offered the experience of a enterprise maturation constructed from associations between individual operators. Like in other parts of the world, in ´90 it was subject to a regulatory revision. This one is not fitted under the usual arguments in most of the international cases, since at the time of its application the service maintains a good performance without requirement of subventions. The revision pursue basically to stimulate technical improvements in management by means of smaller alterations to the pre existing regulation, maintaining a strong level of intervention (franchising).   The outcomes to ten years offer two interesting situations to analyse. On one hand, although the subvention does not motivate the revision, takes place after her, introducing a new element to sectorial history, after 7 years of maintained rates increases. By the other, although the regulation does not undergo substantial reforms, emerges after her a different market structure to the traditional one, showing common results with other national and international experiences of different direction. The regulatory revision also includes services of free offer (without regulation of prices nor of operative conditions), pre existing at the time of its implementation and emerging after her with a different profile from the possessed one previously. The general process can be characterized like a conservative maturation.   Since empirical data on the evolution of the case, the work tries to raise theoretical elements aiming to interpret what instances take part in the displacement of the objectives and results of the policies. For it an integrated analysis of both types of services is made (free offer and public service), and comparative with other national and international experiences by means of the selection of specific topics (the relation between demand and fares, between fares and amount of operators, size of the operators and capacity of innovation, among them). It is applied different points of view and scales of analysis to the characterization of the behaviour in theoretical terms, trying to stimulate the associate reflections with issues displayed in another workshop.