Abstract
An important ingredient of the Swedish railway system is the increased involvement of public actors in the provision of local and regional railway services. The local and regional railway services show the strongest growth of all market segments in the Swedish passenger railway market. The strong growth is due both to changes in travel patterns and improved subsidized railway services. One important factor in the success of the regional public transport authorities’ (PTA) railway services is the redefinition of the scope of these railway services by interconnecting regional railway networks into bigger entities.In 2017, nearly all local and regional railway services in Sweden's most populated region, Mälardalen, became part of a network of railway services subsidized by the PTAs in the greater region. We analyse the cooperative and competitive interactions between the stakeholders in the greater region using the key concepts in the theory of hybrid organizations. We find that despite moving towards a unified public transport market covering many counties the hybrid organizations use different governance structures and have different principles for sharing value creation. The closer cooperation paradoxically enhances competition in the regional railway market, both between subsidized travel cards and between subsidized and commercial railway services.
