Transportation Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) are institutional arrangements designed to facilitate private business activities in public transportation networks. The adoption of transportation PPPs is based upon governments’ efforts to achieve extended efficiency, economy and effectiveness in comparison to the conventional infrastructure procurement systems. However, introducing profit oriented activities in public infrastructures, which basically run on the principles of social welfare, have brought numerous new management issues and risks that were never before observed in the conventional infrastructures procurement systems. New to such risks, the public sector personnel become prone to make mistakes that could cause loss of value to the public and even partnership failure. On t...[ Read more ]

Transportation Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) are institutional arrangements designed to facilitate private business activities in public transportation networks. The adoption of transportation PPPs is based upon governments’ efforts to achieve extended efficiency, economy and effectiveness in comparison to the conventional infrastructure procurement systems. However, introducing profit oriented activities in public infrastructures, which basically run on the principles of social welfare, have brought numerous new management issues and risks that were never before observed in the conventional infrastructures procurement systems. New to such risks, the public sector personnel become prone to make mistakes that could cause loss of value to the public and even partnership failure. On the other hand, private sector companies motivated by profit making capacity of transportation PPPs played certain roles that could inflict upon the social welfare attached with the project, which raised socio-political concerns. Therefore, along with a long list of successful transportation PPP projects, there also lies a notable amount of failed transportation PPP projects. This research is motivated by such failed transportation PPP projects. The research embarks with comprehensive case studies of failed transportation PPPs through the aid of a structured methodology named ‘event sequence mapping (ESM). The ESM helped in identifying 46 failure drivers in transportation PPPs. The causal relationships among failure drives are then identified and named ‘failure mechanisms’. The failure mechanisms associated with public and private sector partners and with the socio-political issues are then evaluated and discussed. All failure mechanisms are then consolidated together to develop an integrated failure mechanism model. A questionnaire survey is conducted to assess the validity and expert opinion on the failure drivers. The questionnaire survey responses are then utilized to perform multiple regression path analysis (MRPA) to assess the strength of causal effects and statistical significance of the identified failure mechanisms. Based on the results of MRPA a statistical significant integrated failure mechanism model is proposed in the last. The integrated failure mechanism model has demonstrated a complex but comprehensive network of failure paths emerging from potential mistakes of the project partners and the socio political factors. The integrated failure mechanisms model has depicted the way failure mechanisms originated at different domains and then blend to act together to make a transportation PPP failure.