Understanding the costs of urban rail transport operations
File(s)
Author(s)
Anupriya
Graham, Daniel J
Carbo, Jose M
Anderson, Richard J
Bansal, Prateek
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
There is considerable variation in the average cost of operations across urban rail transport (or metro) systems. Since metros are typically owned and operated by public authorities, there is a public interest case in understanding the key drivers of their operational costs. This paper estimates short-run cost functions for metro operations using a unique panel dataset from twenty-four metro systems around the world. We use a flexible translog specification and apply dynamic panel generalised method of moments (DPGMM) estimation to control for confounding from observed and unobserved characteristics of metro operations. Our empirical results show that metro systems with a high density of usage are the most cost-efficient. We also find that operational costs fall as metro size increases. These results have important implications for the economic appraisal of metro systems.
Date Issued
2020-08
Date Acceptance
2020-05-29
Citation
Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 2020, 138, pp.292-316
ISSN
0191-2615
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Start Page
292
End Page
316
Journal / Book Title
Transportation Research Part B: Methodological
Volume
138
Copyright Statement
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This manuscript is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Identifier
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191261520303416?via%3Dihub
Subjects
Logistics & Transportation
0102 Applied Mathematics
0905 Civil Engineering
1507 Transportation and Freight Services
Publication Status
Published online
Date Publish Online
2020-06-14