Choice of Frequency and Vehicle Size in Rail Transport: Implications for Marginal External Costs
Abstract
Frequency of services and vehicle size are important policy instruments of railway companies. Extending Mohring's basic 'square root model' for frequencies, we arrive at more general formulations for frequency, vehicle size and price under alternative regimes of welfare and profit optimisation. It appears that in the more refined models the frequency response of railway companies with respect to changes in passenger volumes is not far removed from the standard square root result. After the formulation of theoretical models we also carry out an empirical analysis where choice of frequency and vehicle size are analysed with special attention paid to the level of occupancy rates. It appears that average occupancy rates are low in rail transport. As a result the frequency and vehicle size response of the railway company appears to be low. It is estimated that an increase in the number of passengers of 1% leads to an increase in the supply of capacity of about 0.5 % (a frequency increase of about 0.35% and an increase of vehicle size of about 0.15% ). This has important implications for the environmental costs of railway firms. Given the low occupancy rate, an additional passenger does not lead to a proportional increase in capacity so that the marginal costs are lower than the average costs.Download Info
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.Bibliographic Info
Paper provided by Tinbergen Institute in its series Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers with number 01-109/3.Length:
Date of creation: 20 Nov 2001
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:dgr:uvatin:20010109
Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.tinbergen.nl
Related research
Keywords:This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2002-02-10 (All new papers)
- NEP-MIC-2002-02-10 (Microeconomics)
References
No references listed on IDEASYou can help add them by filling out this form.
Citations
Lists
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.Statistics
Access and download statisticsCorrections
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:dgr:uvatin:20010109For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (webmaster-tinbergen).
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.