Profit or utility maximizing? Strategy, tactics and the Municipal Tramways of York, c. 1918-1935

This paper aims to contest Mees’ (2010) theory that publicly owned public transport operators normatively target their resources to maximize service rather than profit. Mees argues that neoliberal governments in the Anglosphere were mistaken to privatize their undertakings, yet it is shown that the British ethos of municipal trading meant that municipalities always saw public transport as more of a business than a service.

The author uses an archival microstudy of the municipal tramway undertaking of the English city of York, using municipal archives triangulated with local and industry media sources.

The paper proposes the refination of the Mees spectrum of public transport from public to private (2010, pp. 73-75) to note that public undertakings can be operated within a profit-maximizing framework.

This paper provides a rare historical explication of an individual municipal trading enterprise and tramway system placed in its economic context together with its wider theoretical implications.