Privatizing and Deregulating Local Public Services Lessons from Britain's Buses

Abstract

The British Transport Act of 1985 ordered one of the most radical efforts to privatize and deregulate local public services in a developed country. With the exception only of companies serving the Greater London metropolitan area, all public bus companies in Great Britain were ordered reorganized as for-profit corporations; any bus company could offer any unsubsidized (commercial) bus services simply by giving local authorities notice; and local authorities could supplement the commercial services with subsidized ones, but only through competitive bidding among the newly privatized carriers. This article examines the experience of the first two years of the new British policy and argues that it offers important, and generally hopeful, lessons about the potential for privatizing and deregulating local buses and other services in the United States and elsewhere.