An Overview of Public Transport in the United Kingdom and Forecasts for the New Millenium

This conference series has been somewhat dominated by papers on experience from the UK. The first conference in Thredbo in May 1989 featured a large number of papers on the early experience of bus deregulation in Britain which occurred in October 1986. Papers that come to mind include general reviews by Beesley and by White and Turner and case studies by Hills (on Scotland) and by Donald and Pickup (on Merseyside). More theoretical papers were provided by Dodgson and Katsoulacos, by Evans and by Preston (all dated 1989). The debate continued in Tampere (see for example White, 1991, Blundred, 1991) but had petered out by the Toronto conference (other than papers on bus tendering by Newton, 1993, and White and Tough, 1993). However, you can’t keep a good man down. 1992 saw the publication of the railway privatisation White Paper New Opportunities for Railways and the inevitable paper at Toronto (Nash and Preston, 1993). As rail privatisation proceeded, the papers followed at both the Rotorua (Nash, 1995) and Leeds (Nash, 1997) conferences.