An Innovation Strategy for Public Transit Services using a Public-Private-People Partnership

This paper proposes an integrated service management system for a public-private-people partnership (PPPP or 4Ps) of public transit services. In accordance with the trend to disclose public information, sharing the current large volume of public data with public and private companies and promoting the efficiency of financial affairs together with service assurance are critical issues for public transit services. Most local governments provide financial support to private bus companies in order to promote individual mobility by using a deficit covering method. However, local government's role is not only in transit service operations but also in service quality control under bounded financial capability. Taking the complexity and uniqueness of public transit services into account, this study proposes a systematic framework based on the principle of public-private-partnership (PPP or 3Ps) to outline the elements and associated guidance required for knowledge-based public transit services. Further, the concepts of the disclosure of public information and evaluation of public services are embedded into such planning in order to offer self-evolutional public transit services. An interactive transit service promotion mechanism can be established by cooperation between a private sector monitoring group and an academic and non-government organization (NGO) evaluation support group. The goals of the monitoring group are to check periodically overall transit services based on evaluation categories and to report evaluation records to the government on the internet. In this paper, the performance and overall scheme of a public and private partnership in the public transit service of Daejeon Metropolitan City is used as a case study.