Transport Information Group

Here are the latest US Government Accountability Office (US GAO) reports about transportation, published in June 2008.

• Air Traffic Control: FAA Uses Earned Value Techniques to Help Manage Information Technology Acquisitions, but Needs to Clarify Policy and Strengthen Oversight. GAO-08-756, July 18, 2008 (45 pages).
  http://www.gao.gov/docdblite/details.php?rptno=GAO-08-756
• Airline Industry: Potential Mergers and Acquisitions Driven by Financial and Competitive Pressures. GAO-08-845, July 31, 2008 (51 pages).
  http://www.gao.gov/docdblite/details.php?rptno=GAO-08-845
• Aviation Security: Transportation Security Administration Has Strengthened Planning to Guide Investments in Key Aviation Security Programs, but More Work Remains. GAO-08-1024T, July 24, 2008 (13 pages).
  http://www.gao.gov/docdblite/details.php?rptno=GAO-08-1024T
• Commercial Drivers: Certification Process for Drivers with Serious Medical Conditions. GAO-08-1030T, July 24, 2008 (7 pages).
  http://www.gao.gov/docdblite/details.php?rptno=GAO-08-1030T
• Commercial Drivers: Certification Process for Drivers with Serious Medical Conditions. GAO-08-826, June 30, 2008 (25 pages).
  http://www.gao.gov/docdblite/details.php?rptno=GAO-08-826
• Examples of Job Hopping by Commercial Drivers After Failing Drug Tests. GAO-08-829R, June 30, 2008 (9 pages).
  http://www.gao.gov/docdblite/details.php?rptno=GAO-08-829R (more…)
   

The French toll road operator and builder group Vinci recently signed a contract agreement for the Athena-Tsakona toll road concession, a major highway project in Greece. In this project, Vinci Concessions leads a consortium called Olympia Odos, composed of Vinci Concessions (36%), Hochtief PPP Solutions (Germany, 25%) and three Greek contractors Aktor Concessions (18%), JetP-Avax (18%) and Athena (3%).

A colossal project: €2.8 billion, 19 banks!

The project is huge: the consortium will design, finance, build and renovate, and operate the 365-kilometre long Athena-Tsakona toll road for 30 years. There are around 19 kilometres of tunnels, and 400 works of art (bridges, etc.) to build or repair. Also, a total of 163 kilometres of new highway will be built in six years, and 120 kilometres will be renovated. For the construction, Vinci Grands Projets, the contracting subsidiary of Vinci Group will be associated to the German and Greek companies.

The total cost of the project is estimated at €2.8 billion, of which €1.6 billion will be financed by a bank consortium composed of 19 different financial institutions. With this new toll road, Vinci Concessions now operates around 600 kilometres of highways in Greece, after having been known for the famous Rion-Antirion bridge, built under a Public-Private Partnership contract, and now successfully operated for four years. (more…)

Everybody knows summer is a “slow” period. Thus we have not been writing a lot in the last couple weeks on Transport Expertise, but we did quite a bit of thinking to improve the services we provide, and to choose what we will write about in the future.

After six month of successful activity, we needed to figure out where to go and why. Also, some organizational questions have been raised, and we needed time to work on certain things like “How to market our work and the website?”, “How to promote the documents we produce?”, “What do the readers want to read about?”, etc.

To answer the last questions, we analyzed the site statistics and decided that we will mainly concentrate on five particular topics that have been interesting most of Transport Expertise visitors, since the website’s opening:

• High Speed Rail;
• Public Transport: infrastructure, rolling stock, operation;
• PPP / Toll Roads / Infrastructures investments;
• Green Logistics / Green Supply Chain; and
• Freight Rail and Waterways.

Also, in order to better integrate all the services we provide, we chose that we will publish directly the Transport Information Group Newsletter from a “transport-expertise.org” email address. The Google Group that we have been using until now will be abandoned. Working on the new tools will however take time, and we hope the new delivery system to be ready by September 2008. We will thus be able to send other materials such as new study released to our subscribers.

Activity will resume at full rhythm in the next couple days; our goal now is to publish two daily articles, one in French at 2:00 PM Paris time (6:00 AM EST), and one in English published at 12:00 PM EST/9:00 AM PST.

We are still working on two studies that will be released soon (delayed because of the previous reasons):

• French Offer in Urban Mobility;
• High Speed Rail in France.

We hope to see you on Transport Expertise in the next couple weeks/months. We thank you for your support, and wait for your feedback and comments.

Matthieu Desiderio, Transport Expertise Editor

A short brief about the free-access bikes made available by Paris City, in collaboration with JCDecaux advertising company.

Velib’ will celebrate next week its first anniversary and results seem to be far beyond expectations.

Every day, an average 110-120,000 bikes are rented, to ride an average 18 minutes, and Velib’ just past the 26 millionth rental.

As of today, the French capital city has 16,000 bikes available, in 1,200 stations. By the end of the summer, 20,600 bikes will be available and 1,451 stations will be in service. One negative point however, in one year, 3,000 bikes have been stolen and 3,000 more have been destructed… almost perfect!

References from the Transport Information Group

Here are related articles from the Transport Information Group, published in the last couple months.

• In brief: Paris Metro subscribers will all go “Navigo”, January 14, 2008
• London: lower and lower emissions areas to come, February 13, 2008
• In brief: Paris have a dream… car-sharing, January 29, 2008

The operation is (apparently) a success: according to a report from the stocks market authority (Autorité des marchés financiers, AMF), SNCF, the French national railway operator, would hold more than 95% of Geodis shares and right of votes.

This announcement was made by the AMF on Monday, July 7 and the final result of the take over bid is to be known on July 10. Geodis would then be integrated in the SNCF freight and logistics newly formed division.

More information on this issue will be provided on Transport Expertise in the near future.

References

• Article: Succès de l’OPA de la SNCF sur Geodis, La Tribune, Jul. 7, 2008: here

References from the Transport Information Group

• SNCF to buy the last 57% of Geodis it does not own yet, April 7, 2008
• Geodis rapatrié dans le pôle fret de la SNCF, April 7, 2008

FedEx, worldwide leader in express freight and packages transportation, will finance an extension of its infrastructures based in Paris Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport (Roissy-CDG). This site is the most important package sorting warehouse in France for FedEx and employs around 1,800 people of about 2,500 total in France.

FedEx European hub in will be expanded to meet demands of European businesses: the cost is evaluated at €80 million, financed by Aéroports de Paris, the Paris airports authority (that also operates Orly and Le Bourget airports). The package-sorting facility will be expanded from 49,600 to 72,000 square metres, the whole FedEx plant being 77,000 square metres. On the other hand, FedEx announced it will build a “State-of-the-Art, Environmentally-Friendly Facility” in Cologne, Germany. Construction is expected to be finished in September 2009 in Roissy-CDG airport (started in November 2007) and by spring 2010 in Cologne.

In Paris, this will increase package handling capacity by 31%, from 24,000 to 31,500 per hour. Most of the construction work has been done, some parking areas still need to be built, and then, the package sorting and dispatching system will be installed, by 2009. Since it entered the French market in 1985, FedEx never stopped growing. The company innaugurated its Roissy-CDG hub in 1999, which was, at that time the biggest FedEx hub outside the United States, and already represents a €200 million investment since 1999. (more…)