Performance analysis of rail transit investments in Turkey: Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and Bursa

Rail transit investments require the highest amount of investment costs of all modes. Considering the high cost involved, it is particularly important that their performance justifies this high cost and that expectations from these investments are met. Therefore, in the world, it has become an important field of research to study the gap between the expectations from and outcomes of these investments in order to assess the performances. In Turkey, there is a growing interest in constructing rail transit systems in the cities. However, there has been a limited number of studies on the performance of these investments. It is not clear with what expectations these systems are built or whether these expectations are met. There seems to be an urgent need to study these rail investments, with a particular focus on their planning/investment objectives and outcomes. This paper compares the expectations with the actual outcomes. A sample group was selected among the cities currently operating rail transit systems: Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and Bursa. Semi-structured interviews were made with the officers and planners that have involved in the planning or implementation phase of the systems. As the primary indicators of performance, cost and ridership forecast and outcome data are collected and considered in the comparison. It is found that systems performed rather poor in terms of expectations, such as attaining ridership forecasts, being built within budget etc. Hence there is a gap between expectations and outcomes.