On the Pricing of Urban Rail Transit with Track Sharing Freight Service

Chaoda Xie, Xifu Wang and Daisuke Fukuda
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Chaoda Xie: School of Traffic and Transportation, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
Xifu Wang: School of Traffic and Transportation, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 7, 1-29

Abstract: Transporting parcels on urban passenger rail transit is gaining growing interest as a response to the increasing demand and cost of urban parcel delivery. To analyze the welfare effects of different fare regimes when allowing parcel services on an urban rail transit, this paper models the optimal service problem where the transit operator chooses the number of trains and the departure intervals. By introducing a reduced form train timetable problem, the passenger train crowding model is extended to incorporate the effect of freight train scheduling. We show that the freight users are better off in the time-varying optimal fare regime, while passengers are worse off, and that the time-varying optimal fare regime calls for more trains than the optimal uniform fare regime. However, the reduction in passenger trains due to the introduction of freight service can eliminate the welfare gain from passenger time-varying fare. If the price elasticity of freight demand is relatively high, implementing road toll can generate welfare loss when rail transit is privately operated.

Keywords: rail transit; freight; pricing; timetable; optimal service (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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