Strategies to Foster Competition for the Market in the Urban Bus Sector in Developing Countries

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

A very interesting review of market access cases in developing countries. Very good literature review, but the authors failed to list all the cited references (e.g. De Brux and Desrieux 2014; Domingues & Zlatkovic, 2015; Tirole, 1999; UN Habitat, 2017, etc.). This must be fixed.

The authors have answered the research question and present strategies to foster competition for the market in the urban bus sector in developing countries. This is not breakthrough research since the topic was treated in many research papers (some of which are given in literature review), but strategies are well organised and provide sufficient information for understanding their nature and possibilities for application in real urban public systems.

I think that paper lacks "insights from case studies", as stated in abstract. From my point of view, case studies review requires more in-depth analysis and presentation of key facts and figures for each example (size of the PT system, number of lines, vehicles, operators, their structure, costs and revenue ratio, etc.) to get a real insight of market where strategies are applied. However, this does not reduce paper quality, but maybe authors should rephrase this part of the abstract.

A valuable addition to the paper would a list of strategies to be applied based on system KPIs (maybe as a result of in-depth case studies analysis and classification of systems per KPIs' values), to help authorities to narrow the number of possible strategies before making a selection. Or this could a possibility for further research.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

We appreciate your review and all remarks done. Indeed, this is a literature paper, and not a case studies comparison/benchmarking paper. We completely agree that a case study paper should be more detailed. Our intention in this paper is to raise awareness about the most discussed (popular) issues in the academic field regarding the competition for the market in the Urban Bus Sector in Developing Countries. We understand that a review paper about this sector can help new students and practitioners to identify the main problems/challenges within it effortlessly. Finally, as pointed out by you, we revised the abstract and the errors with some references.

Best regards.

Reviewer 2 Report

Very detailed and impressive paper. It gives nice overview. The groupping of the scenarios is great. I miss maybe one point (or I read not enough carefully) the market risk and so the income risk. The different scenarios haveing different share of risk between operator and government as customer. This aspect could be also a point. But maybe as a second paper, as continuation of this paper.

After all, I like the paper it is really great. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you very much for your review. We understand that a review paper about this sector can help new students and practitioners to identify the main problems/challenges within it easily. We will consider your remarks for the continuation of our research.

Best regards.