Efficiency in railway operations through different approaches and contributions to push europe towards green and sustainable mobility
- Autores: Arsen Benga
- Directores de la Tesis: María Jesús Delgado Rodríguez (dir. tes.), Sonia de Lucas Santos (codir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos ( España ) en 2022
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Javier Salinas Jiménez (presid.), María Arrazola Vacas (secret.), José Luis Zafra Gómez (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Ciencias Sociales y Jurídicas por la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
- Materias:
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- Resumen
This research evaluates the efficiency level and the progress in achieving sustainable mobility of the European railway systems. Enhancing the efficiency of railways is recognized of being key to the future of sustainable transportation. However, the share of the rail transport in the European market remains inferior to the road transport and the modal shift incentives seems to be far from reaching their objectives. It makes a heavy burden to the economy, environment and society as road transport has higher costs, is less safe, and releases much more emissions compared to rail. Consequently, the transportation sector continues to move in the wrong direction as trends indicate that by 2050 it will have emissions levels which are superior to all the other sectors of the economy combined. In these conditions of low rail efficiency, dispersed performance of operators, lags in the system reformation, and relaxation of operator’s efforts to improve their performance, the objective of this thesis lays in understanding the current performance and to exploit new opportunities for the European rail sector in moving towards sustainable mobility. To this end, we developed four complementary research papers that integrate several databases, methodologies and approaches with the aim of providing abundant evidence or perception as a response to the formulated questions.
The first paper identifies leading railways in Europe, investigate sources of inefficiency and guide underperformers towards best practices based on a sample of 21 prominent railways during 2016–2018, using Network Data Envelopment Analysis. The ranking obtained indicate on average low efficiency scores, with slight improvements during the time. In a second step we built a performance matrix for identifying priority improvements for each company and run a Tobit regression in exploring the effect of external variables on the estimated efficiency scores. Nation’s wealth, length of haul, length of trip, traffic density, and transport demand were found to be the most significant factors.
The second paper aims to capture the multidimensionality of sustainable transport by combining environmental and safety elements based on a novel intermediate slack-based measures model (VSBM) with undesirable outputs. It is applied to evaluate the performance of 14 European railway operators during the 2010–2018 period. Compared to traditional models, the proposed VSBM model can improve the discriminatory power among peer units and imply drastic changes in the efficiency scores. In particular, the combined assessment of safety and environmental performance offers a new dimension in sustainable transport evaluation.
The third paper explores the efficiency of European railways involved in the commitment signed by the international railway association (UIC) and The Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies (CER), considering the action of European rail companies to reduce the negative externalities of transportation. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was applied under the framework of a slacks-based measure (SBM) and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to account for undesirable outputs and ensure unique rankings. Three different measures were considered: two ordinary energy efficiency models, with and without environmental restrictions, which are input–output ratios, and the eco-efficiency, which is an economic performance to environmental impacts ratio. The results indicate that the average performance of the firms is low, but with a considerable temporal growth which is driven by environmental factors. Several policy-making implications are addressed to assist railway efficiency improvements and avoid anomalies in environmental performance evaluations. This Data Envelopment Analysis application is the first to incorporate several air pollutants in railway efficiency assessment.
The final paper investigates the efforts placed by the European rail operators to improve their environmental performance by considering both market-based and location-based emissions. Additionally, a GHG efficiency measure is proposed to have a more realistic approach in explaining their performance. Results indicate considerable room for improvements, as the scores are less than half of the ideal level. Energy purchasing choices of companies minimally distorted the efficiency scores, and the level of distortion over time has been decreasing. The comparison between the passenger sector and the freight sector gives a further explanation for the performance of individual companies. This is the first time that market-based emissions are considered in a transport efficiency assessment model.
Keywords: railways, NDEA, efficiency, environment, safety, sustainability, VSBM, energy, pollution, SBM; TOPSIS, market-based, location-based.
