Written by: Bård Norheim, Urbanet, Norway Claus Hedegaard Sørensen, VTI and the K2 Swedish National Public Transport Research and Knowledge Centre, Sweden (on Denmark) Anders Wretstrand, Lund University and K2, Sweden Didier van de Velde, Inno-V consultancy, Netherlands

The main objective of the report, commissioned by the Urban Transport Group (UTG), is to review the experiences of franchising public transport services in these countries, to understand why franchising has been chosen by these countries as a way of organising local and regional public transport services, and to present information on the impacts of this choice. Furthermore, in so doing, much information was gathered on the nature and performance of the local and regional public transport system in these countries more broadly, and much of this information is also presented here in order to put the information on franchising, and the contracts that underlie that system, into context. The first chapter summarises the information about all three countries to give a comparative picture of the level of service that a public transport user will encounter in each country, before moving on to comment on how far each country has achieved the outcomes for public transport that are of particular interest to UTG.