Bus transport in the Metropolitan Areas and London

Deregulation of bus services in Metropolitan Areas and London was introduced in the 1985 Transport Act and tendering of bus services in London in the 1984 London Regional Transport Act. To cover all the issues would require a book in itself and the interested reader is referred to the reviews of the theory of contestable markets and predatory practices produced by Dodgson and Katsoulacos (1989), and the early experience in Metropolitan Areas produced for the Association of Metropolitan Authorities (Tyson, 1988; 1989; Pickup et a l , forthcoming) and by the Transport and Road Research Laboratory (Balcombe et al., 1988), and on London (Higginson, 1988; 1989; Bayliss, 1987). In this chapter we focus on one issue in detail, namely the processes by which services are provided in the Metropolitan Areas and London, highlighting the differences between the two systems and commenting on the advantages and disadvantages of each.