What Can Urban Buses Learn about Sunshine Regulation Adopted in Other Sectors?

Abstract

Since 2014, the Portuguese bus market has been experiencing substantial competition and regulatory environment changes. Nevertheless, further improvements in governance and particularly transparency are still needed. This paper intends to explore how the health and water sectors currently apply sunshine regulation to promote healthy competition and improve service quality and how good practices can be replicated into the Portuguese bus sector. We explore the strategies and tools used by the regulators from these two sectors and propose a simplified template to integrate sunshine regulation in public bus operations. The first steps for applying sunshine regulation were taken by recently enacted laws and regulations that impose the need to monitor contracts using performance indicators or other metrics. With this paper, we intend to take a further step suggesting a framework that uses these performance metrics to increase transparency and accountability in the sector.