Lutz Bertling will take over as President and Chief Operating Officer of Berlin-based Bombardier Transportation in June. Prior to joining Bombardier, Bertling was President and Chief Executive of Eurocopter Group, a subsidiary of EADS. He will replace André Navarri, who will remain as Strategic Advisor to the President and Chief Executive Officer of Bombardier Inc  Pierre Beaudoin until he retires in 2014.  ...

New Chairman and Chief Executive of Veolia Transdev Jean-Marc Janaillac has made a series of changes following the project for Caisse des Dépôts to increase its holding and Veolia Environment to scale down its stake. Janaillac has replaced both Jérôme Gallot as Chief Executive and Antoine Frérot as Chairman. Frérot remains a director, as does Antoine Gosset-Grainville on behalf of Caisse des Dépôts, a French state-owned investment bank....

Sir Peter Hendy , Commissioner of Transport for London is set to become the new president of UITP, The International Association of Public Transport. Hendy’s nomination will be confirmed at the UITP’s biennial congress taking place in Geneva at the end of May. He will succeed Ousmane Thiam from Dakar, Senegal, the first African President of the Association who took over from  Alain Flausch when he was selected in 20111 as the new Secretary General of UITP. Hendy has held the...

RATP Dev has confirmed that Elaine Holt has been appointed its UK Rail Franchise Director and will lead its work to pre-qualify for London’s Crossrail operator concession. Holt most recently led National Express’s bid for the Great Western rail franchise after being CEO of Directly Operated Railways, and Chairman of East Coast, from when the government took over the operation in 2009 until 2011. Holt started her career at British Airways in 1987 and worked in a variety of senior...

In the changes following the moves of Howard Smith and Howard Collins, Director of Strategy and Service Development Gareth Powell  (pictured) will take overall responsibility for London Rail, alongside his existing responsibilities. Jonathan Fox will be the Acting Director of London Rail and report to Powell.  Rory O’Neill will become the Acting Director of the DLR, and along with Danny Price, Head of the Emirates Airline cable car and Sharon Thompson, the Director of Tramlink,...

From popular media and political comment, it sometimes seems that fare levels are a really critical issue for public transport, but in fact the role of detailed pricing policies and the wider funding equation are arguably far more important in delivering what users want and growing the market. Analysis of demand elasticity for metro networks worldwide (Anderson, 2011) actually shows that demand is more sensitive to change in level of service than to change in price. It shows, in particular,...

Network Rail studies into future long-distance rail demand in Britain are forecasting significant growth based on national economic and social trends and relative costs . The approach is explained in a draft report on long-distance travel that will inform capacity planning for Network Rail’s regulatory control period 6 (2019/20-2023/24) and beyond. The market study is the first of four to be prepared, with the other three covering regional urban passenger demand; London & South East...

The potential use of existing public transport electricity supply infrastructure for future multimodal electric urban mobility schemes has been considered at an event organised by UITP, The International Association of Public Transport in Brussels. The move towards more electric mobility in urban areas will require major investment in the supporting electric grid and charging infrastructure, and existing systems used by trams, metros and railways could potentially be leveraged for wider...

The European market for Carsharing services -traditionally referred to as car clubs in the UK - continues to grow at an unprecedented rate. Between 2008 and 2012 there was almost a 90% increase in participating members from 500,000 to over 940,000 in “Traditional” or “Peer to Peer (P2P)” Carsharing schemes.  According to Frost & Sullivan analysis, this trend is set to continue; 2020 could see over 15 million traditional Carsharing members (including both...

Derogatory phrases such as “Beeching the Butcher”, or “Beeching’s axe”  tend to appear in Britain whenever there is a reference to the wide ranging proposals he made to cut back the country’s rail services fifty years ago. Yet few who quote his name have probably actually read the Beeching report, The Reshaping of British Railways, in the half century since it was published. The dusty copy from the Institution of Civil Engineers’ library in London...

Kassel is a German city of 200,000 people, lying 150 kilometres north of Frankfurt and just over an hour away on the high-speed Deutsche Bahn ICE train from Frankfurt Airport station. In a league table of German cities ranked by economic development, conducted by the Cologne Institute for Economic Research and published in the magazine Wirtschaftswoche (Economic Weekly), Kassel has emerged as the most dynamic place in the entire country. That means not the top-performing city – more...

According to National Rail’s Journey Planner, a simple trip in the Greater London area from Watford Junction to Woking requires two mainline trains and an Underground ride. First, there is a Midland Mainline (or London Overground)train to London Euston, followed by a transfer to London Underground’s Northern Line to Waterloo, followed by a second transfer at Waterloo to a Southwest Trains service to Woking. This journey requires coordinating three train schedules, passing through up...

Delivering major city rail schemes is so expensive, complicated and integral to city economies that it is hard to believe that a purely private sector approach to finance could ever deliver them, even in an era of shrinking public sector activity. But it will be a new generation of public sector development bodies, with new powers and financial models that will generally drive them forward. Some examples of the new approaches are beginning to emerge. The massive Grand Paris Express...

D espite having historically one of the most comprehensive of the world’s urban and commuter rail systems, London has been playing catch up to Paris, and indeed other cities with S-Bahn-type railways, on its rail network development. While Paris has a mature cross city rail network in the form of its five RER lines, and is now moving on to developing its Grand Paris Express network of orbital super metro lines, London is trying to do both at once, and coming from a long way behind....

Biting the bullet on expensive, transformational, railway schemes is something that mainland European governments have been good at, as exemplified by the development of national high speed rail networks in various countries. But in France attention has turned to capital city Paris, and bullets haven’t come much bigger and faster than that of Grand Paris Express, a plan to revolutionise urban railways there, with a price tag to match. Spiralling costs and delays in estimated completion...

Though Paris and London have attracted attention by developing their regional heavy rail networks to supplement existing tube/metro lines through new cross-city tunnels, they are not the only cities who have taken their city railways beyond the traditional model of large stations at surface level. Elsewhere in Europe Vienna is replacing its South terminal station with a new central Hauptbahnhof station which will link together the routes which converge on Vienna, including international...

Plans for strategic rail network development in London and Paris tell a tale of two cities facing similar challenges. Both have realised that radial rail transport terminating at central locations means massive numbers of passengers overloading local distributor networks of buses or existing underground metros. And both have realised that many travellers are actually trying to get from one side of the city to the other, and don’t want to change between trains which terminate in the city...

The majority of the world’s population now live in urban areas. That point was reached in 2008, according to official UN statistics, as the continuing migration from the countryside and population growth within metropolitan areas have combined to  change the way the majority of the world’s citizens live. 3.3 billion of us now live in urban areas. In 1950 there was just one city of over 10m people – New York. Now there are 27, and experts believe that by the end of 2015,...

IIn the last issue we reported a significant transaction involving a car hire business moving across into urban mobility, with the acquisition of the ZipCar car share system by Avis. It’s not the only major strategic move being made by major players interested in a new role for cars in cities, and now the subject of New Transit’s new Car Share and Urban Mobility event in Brussels on 9th July. Another major deal has seen the big money US private equity firm Carlyle Group buying...

T There’s little disagreement that electrification is the best power system for most railways. But what should be done about branch lines where the business case might not be as clear as that for mainline railway electrification? Without it, through trains from the mainline need to be diesel powered even while travelling the majority of their time under the wires – and diesel trains are less efficient and less reliable than electric ones. Two contrasting approaches in the UK give...