Abstract
This article studies the way economic performance is defined and monitored in the French high speed rail industry under the lens of the theory of «coherence between institutions and technology».
It demonstrates that the institutional organization that existed in France between 1997 and 2014 set apart economic performances monitoring for operations on the one side and for infrastructure on the other side. Both “layers” of the industry (infrastructure and operations) were separated in two entities with no coordination mechanism.
This ill-designed organizational framework has endangered the future development of the industry. It has led to a dramatic increase of the system debt and to a mismatch between the TOCs' needs in terms of HSR infrastructure and the existing HSR network. The current HSR network is likely to be oversized regarding the potential final demand.
This long-lasting misalignment may have led to totally annihilate the eventuality of a real open-access competition in this sector.
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