Role of Government in Transport Industry

– Abbas K. A. (2004) Reinventing Government Role in Transport Sector: The Way Forward. In Proceedings of 10th World Conference on Transport Research WCTR2004, Session H3: Deregulation, Privatisation and New Institutional Concepts. Istanbul, Turkey.
Abstract:
The main aim of this study was to develop a structured framework constituting the generic roles (functions and activities) that ought to be pursued by governments in national transport. The study starts by a world-wide state of the art review of roles played by Australian Department of Transport & Regional Services, United States Department of Transport, the Department of Environment, Transport & Regions in the UK and the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport in Japan. This is followed by discussing three important notions and their effects on government role in the transport sector, namely privatization, sustainability and governance. The framework developed, in this research, classifies the perceived roles of a department of transport into three main categories. The first includes those roles that are necessary to enable the performance of the main roles, so called enabling roles. The second category includes the main instrumental roles of the ministry of transport. Main roles can be defined as those roles that represent the core tasks that ought to be mandated to a Ministry of Transport. The third category includes those roles that are supportive of the main roles. Supporting roles can be defined as those roles that are meant to assist in performing the main roles in an efficient and effective manner. The paper concludes by proposing a government reinvention process involving several phases and stages required to create necessary environment for performing such roles.