Several European countries have involved the private sector to design, build, finance and operate roads as a means to "fast-forward" delivery of road infrastructure and, hopefully, to achieve better value for money. More recently, a number of countries have started to explore extending the involvement of the private sector to maintenance of road network (in contrast to "short" road section) on a similar public-private partnership basis. Whilst public-private partnerships of short sections of roads are widespread, there is no equivalent public-private partnership road network maintenance concession in place to date. This paper looks at some key issues to successfully implementing public-private partnership road network maintenance. Drawing on practical experience from working for (government) sponsors and (private-sector) bidders it aims to provide useful insights of key issues and possible approaches to increase success. Following the introductory section, the second section of the paper discusses selected key legal, financial and technical issues, which need to be addressed. Potential approaches to tackling the key issues from becoming showstoppers are considered in section 3. Section 4 summarises and provides a few words for thought for those considering introducing public-private partnership road network maintenance. For the covering abstract see ITRD E126595.
Samenvatting