Mobility Data Spaces

Transforming Europe into a climate neutral economy by 2050 in line with the European Green Deal places a particular responsibility on the transport sector, which accounts for a quarter of the Union’s total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Specifically, transport will have to collectively reduce its GHG emissions by 90% by mid-century compared to 1990 levels. This will require advancing digitalisation and the use of data in all modes of transport, including passenger and freight segments. Notwithstanding, data availability, access and exchange in the transport sector today continue to be hampered due to unclear regulatory conditions, the lack of an EU market for data provision, the absence of an obligation to collect and share data, incompatible tools and systems for data collection and sharing, different standards, or data sovereignty concerns, among others.

The European strategy for data aims to establish a single market for data where data can be accessed and used efficiently. This will include the creation of a common European mobility data space to facilitate access, pooling, and sharing of transport and mobility data. In this special issue of the Network Industries Quarterly, invited authors critically discuss the opportunities and challenges of building such a mobility data space.

The first contribution by Almasy and de Linde discusses the transformative potential of common European data spaces, and highlights the benefits and challenges involved in implementing them, with a focus on the mobility and transport sector.

The second contribution by Bücking, Drees, Gavaud, Gruber, Hoffmann, Thelisson and van Veenendaal tries to define possible roles of National Access Points in the European Mobility Data Space.

Valkokari explores three layers of data sharing in the context of urban mobility by means of an illustrative case study.

Antoniola analyses Mobility Data Spaces from different angles (EU, national and local) with a focus on the role of local governments.

                                                                                                                                    Matthias Finger

Publication Director

Local utilities and public services in Europe: challenges and opportunities

Local utilities represent one of the least studied subject among the disciplines focused on the transformations of network industries and, more generally, on the delivery of local public services (LPS). This deficit of attention is not due to a lack of relevance, as publicly owned corporations and institutional public-private partnership represent an important phenomenon in many European countries such as Germany, Italy, Austria, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries, just to name a few. More likely, scholars overlooked public utilities because they constitute a difficult topic to deal with. There is no homogeneous legal framework at the European level and each Member State has its own tradition in regulating the utilities. Moreover, even within each national context, reliable databases on local utilities often do not exist and, in any case, it is very difficult to undertake cross-country comparisons. 

The four articles in this special issue confirm the multifaceted nature of this subject and open the floor for future reflections on the role of local utilities and regulation of LPS in Europe. Citroni, Lippi and Profeti highlight the political nature of local utilities. At the crossroad between public ownership and market environment, local utilities stand out as complex agents that are influenced but also able to affect local regulation. In this light Di Giulio and Galanti describe the ongoing regionalization of local public services in Italy. The other two contributions focus on two classical features concerning the regulation of these kinds of markets. Ida and Talit provide insights on the building of a market for bus and coach lines in Israel as a driver of efficiency. Sokołowski explores the potential of local utilities as agents of policy effectiveness in improving energy security. 

Are you also interested in governance of infrastructures in cities? If yes, please visit the IGLUS platform at www.iglus.org which is our dedicated platform to envision Innovative Governance of Large Urban Systems! 

In IGLUS, We have currently launched a MOOC on Management of Urban Infrastructureswhich is a free course diffused through the Coursera platform. For more information about this online course, please visit us at www.iglus.org.

Regulating of Infrastructure Industries in emerging countries

This issue of NIQ is dedicated to some of the best papers presented at the 4th Conference on the Regulation of Infrastructures, which was organized by the Florence School of Regulation in June 2015. Selected academics and practitioners have been invited to Florence to discuss the latest developments in the regulation of different network industries, namely transport, energy, telecoms and water distribution around the world. Both the Conference and this issue of the Network Industries Quarterly have a special focus on emerging countries. Hence, this issue follows the path started by the Spring issue of the NIQ and extends the scope of the regulatory analysis to the emerging countries. 

The first article (Joe Tomain) brings a picture of the US and the historic transformation of the US energy policy. Ricardo Reis, Joaquim Sarmento and Joao Goncalves make an assessment of water utilitiesefficiency using the Portuguese case. The third article (Christian Jaag, Urs Trinkner, Jose Parra Moyano) focuses on the major challenges and opportunities for postal service providers. In the fourth article, Edson Gonçalves and Patrícia Sampaio present the railway privatization process currently undertaken in Brazil. The fifth article (Riham Ahmed Ezzat, Carlo Cambini, Carine Staropoli) looks at 17 Middle East North African (MENA) Countries along a period of 16 years (1995-2010), enquiring whether regulatory reform sequences matter for telecom sectors performances. 

We hope that you find these contributions interesting and we are looking forward to the next edition of the Conference on the Regulation of Infrastructures in June 2016!

Network Industries in Eurasia

Welcome to the Spring 2015 issue of Network Industries Quarterly! For the first time in its history an issue of Network Industries Quarterly is exclusively dedicated to the evolution of network industries outside of Europe, in this case in Eurasia.

The first article (Akkemik and Li) focusses on recent regulatory reforms in the energy market in China, assessing the potential impacts of changes in energy prices in China on producer prices in various sectors. The second article (Cetinkaya, Basaran and Bagdadioglu) discusses the main obstacles to the liberalization of the Turkish electricity sector. The third article (Eroglu) focuses on the role of the regulatory authorities in Turkey’s liberalized electricity market. And the fourth article (Oguz and Benli) discusses fixed-mobile substitution in the context of Turkey’s telecommunications liberalization process.

All four contributions go back to an inaugural Conference on network industries in Eurasia, held at the Social Sciences University in Ankara in November 2014 and which will be held annually from now on. Similar conferences will be organized by network-industries.org in other parts of the world, notably in Africa and Latin America in 2016 and beyond.

We hope that you find these contributions interesting and support Network Industries Quarterly’s reaching out to emerging countries in the future.

Matthias Finger