Evaluation Indicators for the Efficiency of Metro Systems from a Socio-economic-technical Perspective

Metro systems, defined as a kind of major urban infrastructure project, has been considered as an important method of sustainable transportation mode in particular to those newly developed cities where policy makers and planners need solutions to cope with problems of severe traffic congestion and pollution. Governments especially in developing countries have been investing huge amount of resources on the development of metro systems. In line with this, the efficiency of metro systems has attracted increasing interests between governmental officials, professionals and academics. A number of metro systems have been appreciated with good performance, such as New York City Subway, Paris Metro, London Underground, Tokyo Metro, MTR of Hong Kong, and others. Some of these systems were recommended as the benchmark to plan new metro projects or evaluate existing ones. It appears nevertheless that there is little study investing what are the methods for effectively evaluating the performance of metro system. This paper presents four indicators for the evaluation of the performance of Metro systems. Data are collected from worldwide metro systems and used to demonstrate the application of these indicators. These four indicators can demonstrate technical and socio-economic performance of Metro systems in individual cities. Empirical data from 181 cities in 54 nations are used for analysis. The paper concludes that LEN/POP, RID/LEN, RID/POP and FAR/GDP are efficient indicators to evaluate the efficiency of Metro systems from the socio-economic-technical perspective.