Achieving collaboration between local and regional governments aiming to stagger school starting hours

The peak-hour travel demand is the most important operational cost driver for public transport in Sweden. Implementing staggered school starting hours as a measure to spread out the travel demand has proven to be challenging. This study focuses on overcoming barriers to collaboration between public transport authorities, municipalities, and schools concerning school transport planning and school operations scheduling in order to reduce public transport costs. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with individuals with experience in introducing staggered school starting hours. The Institutional Collective Action (ICA) framework was utilised to identify the barriers to collaboration. The paper discusses methods for overcoming these barriers and concludes with actions such as involving all stakeholders in the problem formulation, increasing knowledge of stakeholders’ operations and planning procedures, providing incentives for all actors, and safeguarding the autonomy of each actor. Insights that could also be applied to collaboration with other actors, e.g., workplaces, aiming to stagger commuter peak-hour demand. The study advances the empirical application of the ICA framework by applying it in a Swedish context, in the field of transport planning, and with stakeholders who do not perceive the issue at hand as a problem and lack commitment to finding a joint solution.