Urban public transportation

In this lecture we discuss the economics of public transportation. The first part of the course is devoted to the modelling of a transit system, highlighting its main specific features: that some costs are born by operators while other costs are borne by users, that because of this the design of the system and its pricing are interrelated, and that economies of scale (the Mohring effect) and other externalities (such as congestion or crowding) shape the efficient outcome. Then, the interaction between public and private transport is considered explicitly, both in terms of theory as in simulation/empirics. References to further analyses are discussed throughout.

Leonardo Basso is Full Professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering at Universidad de Chile. His areas of research are transport economics --with particular interests on air and urban transport--, urban economics, and industrial economics and antitrust. He is co-editor in chief of Economics of Transportation, the official journal of the International Transport economics Association, and a member of the editorial board of Journal of Air Transport Management and Transportation Research Part B. He has been teaching at ITEA’s school since 2015. He is a member the Chilean National Academy of Sciences.