The research uses Federal Transit Administration Section 15 data to investigate the operating costs of 13 heavy-rail and 13 light-rail urban mass transit systems for the period 1985-91. A Cobb-Douglas technology is used to investigate various types of economies of scale. The principal findings are: (1) Adding additional passenges to an existing network and schedule of services involves zero marginal cost for heavy-rail systems, and small additional costs for light-rail systems. (2) Adding additional trains, and passengers, to an existing network leads to a less than proportionate increase in costs. (3) An expanded route network results in mild increases in unit costs for the large heavy-rail systems. The smaller light-rail systems display reduced unit costs with an expanded network. The research suggests that the minimum efficient scale for rail operation is approximately 25 route miles.
Scale Economies in Rail Transit Systems
1994
22 pages
Report
No indication
English
Scale Economies in Rail Transit Systems
British Library Conference Proceedings | 1995
|Scale economies in United States rail transit systems
Online Contents | 1997
|TIBKAT | 1994
|SLUB | 1994
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