Analyzing Efficiency of Railway Transportation by Considering Quality of Services: New Data Envelopment Analysis Models

Many studies have been conducted to analyze efficiency of railways for different countries. However, these studies have mainly focused on quantitative aspects of railway transportation and quality has been neglected. In this paper three new data envelopment analysis (DEA) models are presented. The first model is solved for assessing quality of passenger railway services in 71 countries of the world by including perceived quality of railways among outputs of DEA models for the first time in the literature. For the second model which is applied to 27 railways in Europe, a safety index is defined based on number of fatalities and serious injuries and is added as another output. Both models are solved for constant return to scale (CRS) as well as variable return to scale (VRS) setting with output orientation. The follow-up Tobit regression for the first model shows that efficiency results are positively correlated with quality of road and for the second model negatively correlated with the number of level crossings. In the third model which is applied to 19 train operating companies in the UK, passenger-km is the input and stated passenger satisfaction derived from questionnaires together with punctuality level are outputs which proved to be helpful for ranking companies based on quality of their services.