Reforming Public Transport Management in Italy: the Continuous Search for Spending Better

Public sector has been flooded with waves of reforms to improve and make more efficient the services it provides. The local public transport sector has not escaped this major impetus. An intense legislative activity at both the EU and the individual countries parliament is trying to accommodate these new guidelines in order to encourage the emergence of new service organizational forms more output-oriented and more independent from political control. But, local public transport service, compared to education or health, is more problematic to improve because large sums of money are required and significant improvement take many years to achieve. Other European countries have not been trapped in the “make or buy” dilemma, to use or not to use market mechanisms in this particular sector. In a more realistic and pragmatic way they overcame hesitations and chose, for the most part, a path of reforms based on the “market” principles of New Public Management. Surely mistakes were made (to improve the outputs they sacrificed outcomes), but these were followed by corrective action. Italy, unlike other countries, remained stuck in the middle. The objective of this chapter is to show this extreme resistance to experience seriously, deregulation and efficiency-enhanced mechanisms as starting points of the complex service improvement process.