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Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) are mostly implemented for two reasons: to circumvent budgetary constraints, and encourage efficiency and quality in the provision of public infrastructures. One of the ways of reaching the latter objective is by the introduction of performance-based standards tied to bonuses and penalties to reward or punish the performance of the contractor. These performance-based standards often refer to different aspects such as technical, environmental and safety issues.

This paper focuses on the implementation of safety-performance incentives in PPPs. Although safety depends on causes that are hardly manageable by the private contractor (user behaviour, characteristics of the vehicles and so on), there are still some factors—mostly related to the design, maintenance and operation of the infrastructure—that are manageable by the contractor. These factors may play an important role in …