Book Review: Competition in the Regulated Industries: Transportation

Abstract

Professor Fulda has plunged into the thorniest thicket of the regulatory process; he emerges, scratched but undaunted, with a useful and coherent account of what he finds there. In the transportation industries the reconciliation of regulation with competitive norms is most difficult. Other utilities, notably those with geographical monopolies like telephones, electricity, and gas, offer little scope for rivalry of any sort. Except in special cases such as competition between electricity, gas, and oil for domestic space heating use, we can achieve only a pale simulation of competitive pricing by way of rate regulation. In transportation, however, either the reality or the prospect of competition is almost always present. There are, to be sure, patches of monopoly, as when one railroad serves a coal-mining area, or one airline a small city with no practical likelihood of another entrant. But in major markets railroads face other railroads, sometimes water carriers too, and, ubiquitously, trucks. Airlines try to woo business from each other, and, without great success, to attract more of the great mass of travellers who insist on driving vast distances in their own cars.