1
COMPETITIVE TENDERING IN THE NETHERLANDS: 6 LESSONS
FROM 6 YEARS OF TENDERING
Wijnand Veeneman
Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management
Delft University of Technology
Delft (NL)
w.v.veeneman@tudelft.nl
Didier van de Velde
Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management
Delft University of Technology
Delft (NL)
d.m.vandevelde@tudelft.nl
Lars Lutje Schipholt
inno-V adviseurs
Amsterdam (NL)
LLS@inno-V.nl
INTRODUCTION
The Dutch public transport reform
The Dutch public transport regime was revolutionized by the introduction of a competitive
tendering regime in 2001. Since then, the Dutch public transport legislation requires
passenger transport authorities to determine their public transport policy goals, to
determine concession areas and gradually to organize competitive tendering procedures to
award these concessions in exclusivity to operators for periods than can currently extend to
up to 8 years in the bus sector and 15 years in the railway sector.
The former public transport legislation was based upon the principle of market initiative,
whereby transport operators were supposed to behave as entrepreneurs and request
authorizations to operate routes at an appropriate municipal or national government
instance. This regime had, however, evolved towards public monopoly in practice, as
public transport had ceased to be profitable in its own right in the 1960s and all operators
except for some minor exceptions were publicly owned, either by municipalities or by the
national government. Various forms of subsidization were used in the course of time.
These evolved from simple deficit compensation towards more incentivising forms of
subsidization at the end of the period.
The new legislation from 2001 came with the institutionalization of the power of the 12
Provinces and 7 urban area governments as public transport authorities, replacing the role
played hitherto by central government as regulator of the public transport services outside
specific urban areas. The provincial auth